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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE EVOLUTION OF 
CHRISTIANITY 



BY 



LYMAN ABBOTT 



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MAY 13 1892 

BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

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1892 



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Copyright, 1892, 
By LYMAN ABBOTT. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge. Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co, 



PREFACE. 



We are living in a time of religious ferment. 
What shall we do ? Attempt to keep the new 
wine in the old bottles ? That can only end in 
destroying the bottles and spilling the wine. 
Attempt to stop the fermentation ? Impossible ! 
And if possible, the only result would be to 
spoil the wine. No ! Put the new wine into 
new bottles, that both may be preserved. Spir- 
itual experience is always new. It must there- 
fore find a new expression in each age. This 
book is an attempt to restate the eternal yet 
ever new truths of the religious life in the terms 
of modern philosophic thought. 

The teachers in the modern church may be 
divided into three parties : one is endeavoring 
to defend the faith of the fathers and the forms 
in which that faith was expressed ; one repudi- 
ates both the faith and the forms; one holds 
fast to the faith, but endeavors to restate it in 



iv FBEFACE. 

forms more rational and more consistent with 
modern habits of thought. To confound the 
second and third of these parties, because they 
agree in discarding ancient formularies, is a 
natural but a very radical blunder. The New 
Theology does not tend toward unfaith; it is, 
on the contrary, an endeavor to maintain faith 
by expressing it in terms which are more intel- 
ligible and credible. I hope that the reader of 
these pages will discover that I have not aban- 
doned the historic faith of Christendom to be- 
come an evolutionist, but have endeavored to 
show that the historic faith of Christendom, 
when stated in the terms of an evolutionary 
philosophy, is not only preserved, but is so 
cleansed of pagan thought and feeling, as to 
be presented in a purer and more powerful 
form. 

Mr. Drummond has contended, not that there 
is an analogy between natural and spiritual laws, 
but that the natural and the spiritual belong 
to one kingdom, so that the natural laws are 
projected into the spiritual world. It is my en- 
deavor in this volume, in like manner, not to 
trace an analogy between evolution in the phy- 



PREFACE. v 

sical realm, and progress in the spiritual realm, 
but to show that the law of progress is the same 
in both. In the spiritual, as in the physical, 
God is the secret and source of life ; phenomena, 
whether material or spiritual, are the manifesta- 
tion of his presence ; but he manifests himself 
in growth, not in stereotyped and stationary 
forms ; and this growth is from lower to higher, 
from simpler to more complex forms, accord- 
ing to well defined and invariable laws, and 
by a force resident in the growing object itself. 
That unknown force is God — God in nature, 
God in the church, God in society, and God in 
the individual soul. The only cognizable dif- 
ference between evolution in the physical and 
evolution in the spiritual realms is that nature 
cannot shut God out, nor hinder his working, 
nor disregard the laws of its own life ; but man 
can and does. These principles constitute, to 
borrow a musical phrase, the motif of this book. 
The chapters which constitute the book were 
originally delivered, extemporaneously, as lec- 
tures before the Lowell Institute of Boston. 
After their delivery their publication was called 
for. They had not been reported in full, and 



vi PBEFACE. 

compliance with the request for their publication 
necessitated writing them. In some instances 
criticism showed that I had failed to make my 
meaning clear. In such cases I have modified 
my original statements. But this has been done 
only for the purpose of avoiding misapprehen- 
sion, not because in any case I have thought 
it prudent to modify the opinions expressed. I 
have not hesitated to incorporate in the book, as 
in the lectures, the substance, and in some cases 
the phraseology, of previous periodical publi- 
cations ; chapter fourth is to a considerable 
extent such a modification of matter previously 
printed. 

To some readers the chapter on the Evolution 
of the Bible, and that on the Evolution of the 
Soul, may seem to surrender vital and essential 
articles of Christian faith. I hope to others 
they will make all that is vital in the faith of 
the church concerning justification, sin, and 
redemption more rational and credible. My 
aim has been, not to destroy, but to reconstruct. 

LYMAN ABBOTT. 

Bbooklyn, N. Y., May, 1892. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Evolution and Religion . . . . .1 
II. The Evolution of the Bible ... 26 

III. The Evolution of Theology : The Old The- 

ology 68 

IV. The Evolution of Theology : The New The- 

ology 96 

V. The Evolution of the Church . . . 136 

VI. The Evolution of Christian Society . . 173 

VII. The Evolution of the Soul .... 203 

VIII. The Secret of Spiritual Evolution . . 229 

LX. Conclusion: The Consummation of Spiritual 

Evolution 245 



THE 

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 



CHAPTER I. 

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 

Evolution is defined by Professor Le Conte 
as "continuous progressive change, according to 
certain laws, and by means of resident forces." 
Religion has been defined by an English divine 
as "the life of God in the soul of man." It is 
my object to show that the Christian religion is 
itself an evolution ; that is, that this life of God 
in humanity is one of continuous progressive 
change, according to certain divine laws, and by 
means of forces, or a force, resident in human- 
ity. The proposition is a very simple one ; illus- 
trated and applied, it may help to solve some 
of the problems which are perplexing us con- 
cerning the Bible, the church, theology, social 
ethics, and spiritual experience. 

All scientific men to-day are evolutionists. 
That is, they agree substantially in holding 
that all life proceeds, by a regular and orderly 



2 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

sequence, from simple to more complex forms, 
from lower to higher forms, and in accordance 
with laws which either now are or may yet be 
understood, or are at all events a proper sub- 
ject of hopeful investigation. The truth of this 
doctrine I assume ; that is, I assume that all life, 
including the religious life, proceeds by a reg- 
ular and orderly sequence from simple and lower 
forms to more complex and higher forms, in 
institutions, in thought, in practical conduct, 
and in spiritual experience. It is my purpose 
not so much to demonstrate this proposition as 
to state, exemplify, and apply it. 

As "evolution" is the latest word of science, 
so "life" is the supreme word of religion. All 
religious men agree that there is a life of God 
in the soul of man. Max Muller suggests a 
more scientific definition of religion, — but the 
two are identical in sense, though different in 
form. He says that "religion consists in the 
perception of the Infinite under such manifesta- 
tions as are able to influence the moral character 
of man." 1 The Christian religion, then, is the 
perception of that manifestation of God, histori- 
cally made in and through Jesus Christ, which 
has produced the changes in the moral life of 
man whose aggregate result is seen in the com- 
plex life of Christendom, past and present. As 

1 Natural Religion, p. 188. 



EVOLUTION AND BELIGION. 3 

all scientific men believe in evolution, — the 
orderly development of life from lower to higher 
forms, — so all Christians believe that there has 
been a manifestation of God in Jesus Christ 
which has produced historical Christianity. As 
I assume the truth of evolution, so I assume the 
truth of this fundamental article of the Christian 
faith. With the scientific believer, I believe in 
the orderly and progressive development of all 
life ; with the religious believer, I believe in the 
reality of a life of God in the soul of man. It is 
not my object to reconcile these two beliefs, but, 
assuming the truth of both, to show that this 
divine life is itself subject to the law of all life ; 
that Christianity is itself an evolution. Apply- 
ing this law to the history of the Christian re- 
ligion, it is my object to show that the manifesta- 
tion of God in Jesus Christ has been a gradual 
and growing manifestation, and that the changes 
wrought thereby in the moral life of man have 
been gradual and growing changes, wrought by 
spiritual forces, or a spiritual force, resident in 
man. 

There are in Professor Le Conte's definition 
of evolution three terms. Evolution is first a 
continuous progressive change; second, accord- 
ing to certain laws ; third, by means of resident 
forces. Each of these elements enters into and 
characterizes the development of Christianity. 



4 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Christianity has been, not a fixed and unchang- 
ing factor, but a life, subject to a continuous 
progressive change; this change has been, not 
lawless, irregular, and unaccountable, but ac- 
cording to certain laws, which, though by no 
means well understood, have never been either 
suspended or violated; and the cause of this 
change, or these changes, has been a force, not 
foreign to man himself, but residing in him. 
Thus Christianity, whether regarded as an insti- 
tutional, an intellectual, a social, or a moral life, 
has exemplified the law of evolution. 

A few more words of exact definition are 
needed, for it cannot be doubted that in the 
discussion concerning the relation of Christian- 
ity to evolution — or in the larger and less exact 
phrase, concerning the relation of theology to 
science — there has been much ignorance and 
more prejudice: on the part of theological ex- 
perts, ignorance respecting the true nature of 
evolution ; on the part of scientific experts, igno- 
rance respecting the true nature of religion. The 
theological discussions of our time grow out of 
an attempt, on the one hand, to restate the prin- 
ciples of the Christian life in terms of an evolu- 
tionary philosophy, or in terms consistent with 
that philosophy; and, on the other hand, out of 
resistance to this attempt, either by denying 
evolutionary philosophy altogether, or by main- 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 5 

taining that the Christian religion is an exception 
to the ordinary laws of life : that it is not and 
cannot be a continuous progression, but is and 
must be always unchanging; that it is not gov- 
erned by certain laws, certainly not by laws 
which man can understand, but is dependent on 
the inscrutable if not capricious will of an un- 
known Person ; that it has its operating causes, 
not in a force or forces resident in humanity, 
but in a force or forces outside humanity. As 
I have said, I do not propose to discuss this 
question, except as an attempt to restate the 
principles of the Christian life in the terms of 
an evolutionary philosophy is such a discussion ; 
but it is evident, if such a restatement is to be 
made, that we must understand at the outset 
what we mean both by evolution and by the 
Christian life. 

The doctrine of evolution, then, makes no at- 
tempt whatever to explain the nature or origin 
of life. It is concerned, not with the origin, 
but with the phenomena of life. It sees the 
forces resident in the phenomena, but it throws 
no light on the question how they came there. 
It traces the tree from the seed, the animal 
from the embryo, the planetary system from 
its nebulous condition; it investigates and as- 
certains the process of development : but it does 
not explain, or offer to explain, what is the 



6 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

difference between the seed which is a living 
thing and the grain of sand which is dead, or 
between the vitalized and the unvitalized egg, 
or what there is in the nebulae which produces 
out of chaos a beautiful world fitted for human 
habitation. One may with Haeckel believe in 
spontaneous generation, or with Tyndall disbe- 
lieve in it, and in either case be an evolutionist. 
Evolution traces only the processes of life; it 
does not offer to explain the nature or the origin 
of life. Life antedates all progress; and evo- 
lution only traces progress. The evolutionary 
theologian, then, must believe that the spiritual 
life shows itself in a continuous progress accord- 
ing to an orderly and regular sequence ; but his 
belief in evolution will throw no light whatever 
on the question as to the secret of that life which 
antedates spiritual progress. He must believe 
that this spiritual force is resident in humanity ; 
but how it came to be resident in humanity, 
evolution cannot tell him. This he must learn, 
if at all, elsewhere. 

Making no attempt to explain the origin of 
life, the evolutionist insists that the processes of 
life are always from the simple to the complex : 
from the simple nebulae to the complicated world 
containing mineral substances and vegetable and 
animal life ; from the germinant mollusk through 
every form of animate creation up to the ver- 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 7 

tebrate mammal, including man ; from the fam- 
ily, through the tribe, to the nation; from the 
paternal form of government, through the oli- 
garchic and the aristocratic, to the democratic ; 
from slavery, — the patriarchal capitalist own- 
ing his slave on terms hardly different from 
those on which he owns his wife, — to the com- 
plicated relationship of modern society between 
employer and employed. In this movement, 
notwithstanding apparent blunders, false types 
and arrested developments, the evolutionist sees 
a steady progress from lower to higher forms 
of life. The Christian evolutionist, then, will 
expect to find modern Christianity more com- 
plex than primitive Christianity. For the pur- 
pose of this comparison, I do not go back of 
Bethlehem: then, the confession u Thou art the 
Christ, the Son of the Living God," — now, the 
Episcopal Thirty-nine Articles, the Methodist 
Episcopal Twenty -four Articles, or the West- 
minster Confession of Faith of Thirty-three 
Chapters, with their numerous sub-sections; 
then, the simple supper-talk with the twelve 
friends, met in a fellowship sanctified by prayer 
and love — now, an elaborate altar, jeweled vest- 
ments, pealing organ, kneeling and awe-stricken 
worshipers; then, meetings from house to house 
for prayer, Christian praise, and instruction in 
the simpler facts of the Master's life and the 



8 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

fundamental principles of his kingdom, — now, 
churches, with preachers, elders, bishops, ses- 
sions, presbyteries, councils, associations, mis- 
sionary boards ; then, a brief prayer, breathing 
the common wants of universal humanity in a 
few simple petitions, — now, an elaborate ritual, 
appealing to ear and eye and imagination, by all 
the accessories which art and music and historic 
association combined can confer; then, a bro- 
therhood in Jerusalem, with all things in com- 
mon, and a board of deacons to see that all were 
fed and none were surfeited, — now, a brotherly 
love making its way, in spite of selfishness, to- 
wards the realization of that brotherhood of hu- 
manity which is as yet only a dream of poets. 
And he will, expect to find that the Christianity 
of the nineteenth century, despite its failures 
and defects, is better, intellectually, organically, 
morally, and spiritually, than the Christianity 
of the first century. 

The doctrine of evolution is not a doctrine of 
harmonious and uninterrupted progress. The 
most common, if not the most accurate formula 
of evolution is "struggle for existence, survival 
of the fittest." The doctrine of evolution as- 
sumes that there are forces in the world seem- 
ingly hostile to progress, that life is a perpetual 
battle and progress a perpetual victory. The 
Christian evolutionist will then expect to find 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 9 

Christianity a warfare — in church, in society, 
in the individual. He will expect Christianity 
to be a Centaur, — half horse, half man; a Lao- 
coon struggling with the serpents from the sea ; 
a seed fighting its way against frost and dark- 
ness towards the light and life. He will recur 
continually to his definition that evolution is a 
continuous progressive change by means of resi- 
dent forces. He will remember that the divine 
life is resident in undivine humanity. He will 
not be surprised to find the waters of the stream 
disturbed; for he will reflect that the divine 
purity has come into a turbid stream, and that it 
can purify only by being itself indistinguishably 
combined with the impure. When he is told 
that modern Christianity is only a "civilized 
paganism," he will reply, "That is exactly what 
I supposed it to be ; and it will continue to be a 
civilized paganism until the civilization has en- 
tirely eliminated the paganism." He will not 
be surprised to find pagan ceremonies in the rit- 
ual, pagan superstitions in the creed, pagan self- 
ishness in the life, ignorance and superstition in 
the church, and even errors and partialisms in 
the Bible. For he will remember that the divine 
life, which is bringing all life into harmony with 
itself, is a life resident in man. He will re- 
member that the Bible does not claim to be the 
absolute Word of God; that, on the contrary, 



10 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

it declares that the Word of God was with God 
and was God, and existed before the world was ; 
that it claims to be the Word of God, as per- 
ceived and understood by holy men of old, the 
Word as spoken to men, and understood and 
interpreted by men, who saw it in part as we 
still see it, and reflected it as from a mirror in 
enigmas. He will remember that the Church is 
not yet the bride of Christ, but the plebeian 
daughter whom Christ is educating to be his 
bride. He will remember that Christianity is 
not the absolutely divine, but the divine in hu- 
manity, the divine force resident in man and 
transforming man into the likeness of the divine. 
Christianity is the light struggling with the 
darkness, life battling with death, the spiritual 
overcoming the animal. The end is not yet. 
We judge Christianity as the scientist judges 
the embryo, as the gardener the bud, as the 
teacher the pupil, — not by what it is, but by 
whaf it promises to be. 

The doctrine of evolution is not inconsistent 
with the existence of types of arrested develop- 
ment, nor with deterioration and decay. The 
progress is continuous, but not unbroken. Na- 
ture halts. She shows specimens of unfinished 
work. Evolution is not all onward and upward. 
There are incomplete types, stereotyped and 
left unchanged and unchanging; there are no- 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 11 

movements, lateral movements, downward move- 
ments; there is inertia, death, decay. The 
Christian evolutionist is not therefore surprised 
to find all these phenomena in the evolution of 
Christianity. His finding them there does not 
shake his faith in the divine life which struggles 
toward victory against obstacles, and sometimes 
seems to suffer defeat. He expects to find faith 
hardened at certain epochs into cast-iron creeds ; 
thought arrested in its development; men strug- 
gling to prevent all growth, imagining that death 
is life and life is death, that evolution is danger- 
ous and that arrested development alone is safe. 
He expects to find pagan superstitions sometimes 
triumphing over Christian faith, even in church 
creeds ; pagan ceremonies sometimes masquerad- 
ing in Christian robes, even in church services ; 
and pagan selfishness poisoning the life blood of 
Christian love, even in communities which think 
themselves wholly Christian. 

"A growing tree," says Professor Le Conte, 
" branches and again branches in all directions, 
some branches going upward, some sidewise, 
and some downward, — anywhere, everywhere, 
for light and air ; but the whole tree grows ever 
taller in its higher branches, larger in the cir- 
cumference of its outstretching arms, and more 
diversified in structure. Even so the tree of 
life, by the law of differentiation, branches and 



12 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

rebranches continually in all directions, — some 
branches going upward to higher planes (pro- 
gress) ; some pushing horizontally, neither rising 
nor sinking, but only going further from the 
generalized origin (specialization); some going 
downward (degeneration), — anywhere, every- 
where, for an unoccupied place in the economy of 
Nature ; but the whole tree grows ever higher in 
its highest parts, grander in its proportions, and 
more complexly diversified in its structure." 
Consciously or unconsciously, Professor Le 
Conte has borrowed his figure from Christ. The 
mustard seed is growing to be the greatest of all 
herbs; but it grows in all directions; some 
branches pushing upward to higher planes ; some 
growing only further and further away from the 
original stock, different therefrom in apparent 
direction, yet the same in nature and in fruit; 
some growing downward and earthward; some 
with fresh wood and fresh leaves ; some halting 
in their growth and standing stunted and 
dwarfed, yet living; some dead, and only wait- 
ing the sharp pruning knife of the gardener, or 
nature's slower knife of decay; yet the whole 
"higher in its highest parts, grander in its pro- 
portions, and more complexly diversified in its 
structure" than when theNazarene cast the seed 
into the ground by the shores of Gennesaret. 
Then, a solitary physician, healing a few score 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 13 

of lame and halt and blind and lepers by a touch 
or a word, — now, throughout all lands which 
his presence has made holy, hospitals for every 
form of disease known among mankind; then, 
a single feeding of five thousand men, beside 
women and children, seated in serried ranks 
upon the ground, — now, an organized benefac- 
tion, which, through the consecrated channels of 
commerce, so distributes to the needs of man, 
that in a truly Christian community a famine 
is well-nigh impossible ; then, a single teacher 
speaking to a single congregation on the hillside 
and illustrating the simplest principles of the 
moral life, — now, unnumbered followers, so in- 
structing men concerning God, duty, love, life, 
that not only does every nation hear the truth 
in a dialect which it can understand, but every 
temperament also in a language of intellect and 
emotion unconsciously adapted to its special 
need. 

Does any Christian think that such a view 
is lacking in reverence for the Master? He 
may settle the question with the Master him- 
self, who said, " Greater works than these shall 
ye do; because I go to my Father." 

I may perhaps assume that the scientist, if 
he accepts religion in any sense, will not object 
to this view of Christianity. If he believes 
that man is a spiritual being and possesses a 



14 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

spiritual life, he will welcome the attempt to 
trace the development of this life according to 
the now generally accepted principles of evolu- 
tion. But certain religious minds will at once 
interpose an objection. The religious life will 
seem to them to be an exception to the general 
law of evolution. They may hesitate to formu- 
late an objection which their feeling really in- 
terposes. They may even be startled if they 
attempt to formulate such an objection, by dis- 
covering that, in so doing, they are denying the 
unity of life, and thus in fact, though not in form, 
throwing doubt upon the unity of God. But 
they will easily find this objection formulated 
for them. They will find it stated by Lord 
Macaulay in the interest of rationalism. "All 
divine truth," he says, u is, according to the doc- 
trine of all Protestant churches, revealed in cer- 
tain books. It is equally open to all who, in 
any age, can read those books ; nor can all the 
discoveries of all the philosophies of the world 
add a single verse to any of those books. It is 
plain, therefore, that in divinity there cannot 
be a progress analogous to that which is con- 
stantly taking place in pharmacy, geology, and 
navigation. A Christian of the fifth century 
with a Bible is neither better nor worse situated 
than a Christian of the nineteenth century with 
a Bible, candor and natural acuteness being of 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 15 

course supposed equal." 1 They will find the 
same objection to progress in religion stated 
with equal vigor by Dean Burgon, but in the 
interest of theological conservatism. "The es- 
sential difference between theology and every 
other science which can be named is this : that 
whereas the others are progressive, theology 
does not admit of progress, and that for the rea- 
son already assigned, viz., because it came to 
man, in the first instance, not as a partial dis- 
covery, but as a complete revelation. Whereas, 
therefore, in the investigation of natural phe- 
nomena, man's* business is to discover some- 
thing new, theology bids its professors inquire 
for what is old." 2 

This objection cannot be met by analogical 
arguments from other departments of thought 
and life, for its gist lies in a supposed contrast 
between theology, the science of the divine life, 
and all other sciences. The Bible is interpreted, 
alike by Lord Macaulay and by Dean Burgon, 
alike by the apostle of a cultivated agnosticism 
and by the representative of a conservative ec- 
clesiasticism, as a bar to progress in theology. 
It would be vain to point out that the Christian- 

1 Macaulay 's Essay on Ranke's "History of the Popes," 
Miscellaneous Works, vol. ii. p. 618. 

2 Dean Burgon, in the Fortnightly Review for April, 1887, 
p. 606. 



16 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ity of the nineteenth century is not the same as 
the Christianity of the first century. The reply 
will be that it is not the same because of the de- 
cadence into which the church has fallen. We 
turn, then, to the Bible itself, since those who 
deny that progress may be predicated of religion 
claim to base this denial wholly upon the Bible, 
and ask whether it claims to prevent or to pro- 
mote progress in religious thought ; whether 
its command is "halt" or "forward march;" 
whether, in Dean Burgon's phrase, it forbids 
men to discover aught that is new, and com- 
mands those who believe in it to inquire only 
for what is old. 

To ask this question is to answer it. The most 
casual glance at the Bible discloses the fact that, 
from its opening to its closing utterance, it is 
the record of progress, a call to progress, an in- 
spiration to progress. Its face is always set 
towards the future. The story of the Fall in 
Genesis is in some respects similar to that in 
other ancient legends; but Genesis alone con- 
tains a promise of restoration, "He shall bruise 
thy heel, but thou shalt bruise his head." Poi- 
soned shalt thou be by the spirit of evil, but the 
spirit of evil shall be ground to powder beneath 
thy feet at last. The story of the Deluge is com- 
mon to Genesis and other traditions as ancient 
or more ancient ; but it is in Genesis that the 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 17 

rainbow spans the retreating cloud, bidding man 
look forward with hope to a divinely ordered 
future. Abraham is led out of the land of his 
idolatry by a promise to be fulfilled, not in his 
time, but in that of his children's children. 
Israel is summoned out of Egypt by the expec- 
tation of a future prosperity for which the past 
and the present give no warrant. The Taber- 
nacle in the Wilderness is a preparation for a 
Temple in the Holy Land. The Temple is de- 
stroyed forever, and with it the idolatrous idea 
that God's presence is confined to holy places, 
or his revelation of himself to particular forms ; 
in its place, seventy years of exile give to the 
Jewish people the Synagogue and the Holy 
Scriptures. From Genesis to Malachi the faces 
of patriarch, prophet, and priest are turned to 
the future : the religion of the Old Testament is 
a religion of expectancy ; the hope and faith of 
Israel are fixed upon a Coming One. The con- 
dition of the Jews is exactly the reverse of that 
which Dean Burgon recommends ; their theology 
makes it their business to look for something 
new, not to inquire for and be content with what 
is old. 

Three or four centuries pass by. The now 
dispensation opens with a prophecy and a prom- 
ise. Its first word turns all thoughts to the fu- 
ture. Prepare ye the way of the coming Lord 



18 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

is the burden of John the Baptist's message. 
Jesus takes up the cry. His preaching is also 
a summons to hope and expectancy : " The king- 
dom of God is at hand." The people dwell in 
their past ; he summons them continually to the 
future. They are content with Moses and the 
prophets ; he not only proclaims another and a 
better law, but he also declares in unmistakable 
terms his relation to the old : it is unfinished, he 
comes to complete ; it is undeveloped, he comes 
to ripen. The process will be gradual; the con- 
summation requires time. His kingdom is not 
a completed kingdom : it is a seed cast in the 
ground; it is a wheat-field growing up for a 
future harvest. His teaching is new wine, it re- 
quires new bottles ; it is a new life, it requires 
a new garment. The institutions of Christianity 
must be elastic, because Christianity itself is 
a growing religion, with a life greater in the 
future than in the present. As the end draws 
near, Christ gathers with his disciples outside the 
walls of Jerusalem, and as the setting sun gilds 
the spires and domes of the Holy City, he fore- 
tells the destruction of Jerusalem, and bids his 
disciples take a long look forward, through the 
gloom of that dreadful day, to a redemption to 
be perfected and a Second Coming of the Re- 
deemer. He meets them in the upper chamber, 
where he repeats the message in tenderer words : 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 19 

he has many things to say to them which now 
they are not able to bear ; they must wait for the 
best; it lies in the future. As he ascends out 
of their sight, the angelic word to them is that 
they must look for his reappearing, and through 
patience, hope, and a blessed activity prepare for 
it. That which inspires the apostles, as they take 
up their work, is not the memory of a great 
past, but the hope of a great future. They are 
as those that seek a country. They are pil- 
grims and strangers, and their haven lies before 
them. They forget the things that are behind; 
they press forward for their prize. They count 
not themselves to have attained; they follow 
after, if they may apprehend that for which they 
are apprehended in Christ Jesus. They look 
for a new heaven and a new earth in which 
dwelleth righteousness. They exhort one an- 
other to grow in grace and in knowledge. And 
when at last the canon closes, the last vision 
which greets our eyes is not a completed city, 
but a city still descending out of heaven upon 
the earth; not a completed victory, but a Cap- 
tain riding forth conquering and to conquer; 
not a kingdom accomplished, but an hour yet to 
come when the kingdoms of this earth shall have 
become the kingdom of our Lord and of his 
Christ. From the vague promises of redemp- 
tion in the first chapter of Genesis to the clear 



20 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

vision of victory in the last chapter of Revela- 
tion, the cry of patriarch, prophet, martyr, 
apostle, and seer is the cry of the Lord to Moses 
by the shore of the Ked Sea: "Speak unto the 
children of Israel that they go forward." If 
Lord Macaulay and Dean Burgon are right, if 
"theology does not admit of progress," Moses 
could not have added to Abraham's call the 
clearer words of the Ten Commandments, nor 
David supplanted the Tabernacle with prepara- 
tions for a Temple, nor the prophets of exile 
have encouraged the organization of the syna- 
gogues, nor the Master substituted the Sermon 
on the Mount for the Mosaic Law, nor Paul 
have completed the wisdom of Proverbs and 
Ecclesiastes with the diviner and profounder 
wisdom of the Epistles to the Romans and to 
the Ephesians. 

This whole notion of revealed religion consist- 
ing in a revelation made once for all and there- 
fore forbidding progress, or confining it within 
very narrow limits, — to the criticism and inter- 
pretation, for example, of a Book or a restate- 
ment of what the Book says, but in slightly dif- 
ferent forms of speech, — grows out of a singular 
misapprehension of the nature of revelation. 
The sun in the heavens is obscured by the clouds ; 
through a break in the clouds it appears for an 
instant; the navigator catches its place, makes 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 21 

up his record, and by that record thenceforth 
steers his vessel. So the ancient prophets are 
conceived to have caught a glimpse of divine 
truth, entered it in their log, and given us the 
reckoning by which ever after the world is to 
be navigated. But this notion of revelation, as 
something external to man, is as inconsistent 
with Scripture as it is with the analogies of all 
education and the fundamental principles of 
psychology. Revelation is unveiling; but the 
veil is over the mind of the pupil, not over the 
face of the truth. This veil is removed and 
can only be removed gradually, as the mind it- 
self acquires a capacity to perceive and receive 
truth before incomprehensible. The figure is 
not original with me; I borrow it from Paul: 
"Even unto this day when Moses is read, the 
veil is upon their heart. Nevertheless, when one 
shall turn to the Lord, the veil shall be taken 
away." The heavens are not veiled from the 
pupil, but the pupil is veiled, so that he can- 
not comprehend the stellar spaces, magnitudes, 
movements, until education has removed the veil 
and so revealed the truth. 

As in physical, so in moral science, revealing 
is a psychological process. It is the creation of 
capacity, — moral and intellectual, or both. In 
the nature of the case it can be nothing else. 
Truth cannot be revealed to incapacity. That 



22 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

God is love is the simplest, as it is the most 
fundamental revelation concerning God which 
his Word contains. But it means and can 
mean no more than love means to the individual 
soul. The child in the infant class prattles it 
artlessly, scarcely knowing the meaning of the 
word. The maiden sees a new and deeper 
meaning in it, as love looks out of her eyes into 
the eyes of the bridegroom at the altar. The 
mother has a new revelation when the babe 
upon her bosom strikes a new note of love in 
her heart. The aged saint, through the joy and 
the sorrow of love, the hunger and the satisfac- 
tion of love, love at the marriage, love in the 
home, love at the open grave, has learned some- 
thing more, though not all, of the height and 
depth, the length and breadth of love immeas- 
urable; the text lightly dropped from her lips 
in childhood she cannot speak without bowed 
head and tearful eyes. As with the individual, 
so with the race : love means in the Nineteenth 
Century what it could not mean in the First ; 
from the lips of a Henry Ward Beecher what it 
could not mean from the lips of an Augustine 
or a Calvin. 

Thus the Bible is not so much a revelation as 
a means of revelation. It is a revelation, be- 
cause beyond all other books it stimulates the 
moral and spiritual nature, stirs men to think 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 23 

and feel, awakens their life, and so develops in 
them a capacity to perceive and receive the 
truths of the moral and the spiritual order. 
God is not veiled, but man is blind; and the 
Bible opens the eyes of the blind. The church 
has indeed often adopted, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, the philosophy of Lord Macaulay and 
Dean Burgon ; it has endeavored to crystallize 
truth into a formal and final state. For a creed 
is truth crystallized. But a crystal is a dead 
thing, and truth is living. Truth is not a crystal, 
it is a seed. It is to be planted, and what comes 
from the planting will depend as much on the 
soil in which it is planted as on the seed itself. 
The figure is Christ's. "A sower went forth to 
sow; some seed fell by the wayside, some upon 
stony places; some among thorns; some into 
good ground and brought forth fruit, some an 
hundred fold, some sixty fold, some thirty fold." 
Which way does the seed look : backward to the 
winter or forward to the autumn? The fun- 
damental difficulty about all attempts to define 
truth in a creed is that truth is infinite, and 
therefore transcends all definitions. As soon as 
humanity understands the creed, the creed ceases 
to be to humanity the whole truth; because 
there is truth yet beyond, not confined within 
the creed. The fundamental difficulty in all 
attempts to reduce truth to a dogma is that they 



24 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY, 

are attempts to reveal truth without imparting 
life. But truth cannot be revealed except as 
life is imparted; for we can know only as we 
live. Revelation is, of psychological necessity, 
progressive; for we know the truth only as we 
grow in life-capacity to know the truth. The 
Bible never falls into the error of the church. 
It never attempts to reduce truth to a dogma, 
never crystallizes it in a creed. The value of 
the Bible is not that it furnishes men with 
thought, but that it makes them think. The 
Bible is a revelation because it is a literature of 
power; it operates on humanity for cataract; 
it removes the veil from the readers' eyes ; it stirs 
them to see truth with their own eyes and to 
think it in their own thoughts. 

In fact, this has always been the effect of 
the Bible. Churches, creeds, and theological 
and ecclesiastical systems have often repressed 
thought, checked it, or at least tethered it. The 
Bible has emancipated the mind, set men think- 
ing, and created differences and divisions. Not 
without historical warrant does Kaulbach, in his 
cartoon of the Reformation, group all the in- 
tellectual activity of the Seventeenth Century 
around Luther with his open Bible in his hand. 
The Bible reveals truth not by making it so plain 
that men need not study, but by making it so 
fascinating that they must study. Lessing said 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 25 

that if one offered him Truth in the one hand 
and Search for Truth in the other, he would 
choose Search for Truth. Search for Truth the 
Bible has given to man ever since the Waldenses 
studied it in secret in their mountain fastnesses, 
and by it fed that independence and individu- 
ality which the ecclesiasticism of their age had 
almost extirpated everywhere else in Europe. 

The belief, then, that the Christian religion is 
a divine life is not inconsistent with the belief 
that it is an evolution, since evolution offers no 
explanation of the nature or origin of life ; it 
only explains life's process. The belief that the 
Bible is a revelation from God is not inconsis- 
tent with the belief that the Christian religion 
is an evolution ; for revelation is not a final state- 
ment of truth, crystallized into dogma, but a 
gradual and progressive unveiling of the mind 
that it may see truth clearly and receive it vitally. 
The Bible is not fossilized truth in an amber 
Book; it is a seed which vitalizes the soil into 
which it is cast; a window through which the 
light of dawning day enters the quickened mind ; 
a voice commanding humanity to look forward 
and to go forward; a prophet who bids men 
seek their golden age in the future, not in the 
past. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 

Accokding to Max Miiller, religion consists 
in "the perception of the Infinite under such 
manifestations as are able to influence the moral 
character of man." According to Professor Le 
Conte, evolution is "continuous progressive 
change, according to certain laws, and by means 
of resident forces." According to the evolution- 
ary theory, therefore, revelation will be such a 
manifestation of the Infinite as is able to influ- 
ence the moral character of man, made, however, 
not perfect and complete at the outset, but in a 
series of continuous progressive changes, accord- 
ing to certain laws, and by means of a spiritual 
force or forces in the men who are themselves 
the media of this revelation. The current ques- 
tions in Christian circles respecting the Bible 
may all be reduced to the question whether rev- 
elation is thus a progressive revelation, with 
those incompletenesses and imperfections which 
are necessary accompaniments of progression, or 
whether it is a complete and perfect revelation, 
unchanging and unchangeable from the outset, 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 21 

and like its divine Author, the same yesterday, 
to-day, and forever. 

The question, therefore, to which I invite the 
reader's attention in this chapter is not whether 
the Bible is an inspired literature and contains 
a divine revelation. To deny this is to deny 
Christianity. He who disbelieves in the Bible 
as the text-book of revealed religion is not in 
his belief a Christian, whatever he may be in his 
character. He is, properly speaking, a theist. 
The Bible has a unique place in the literature 
of the world. It has comforted the sorrowing, 
inspired the apathetic, guided the perplexed, 
strengthened the weak, and called to practical 
repentance the sinful and *the erring. No the- 
ology can be true which takes this Bible out of 
human life, weakens its sacred authority, makes 
it less valuable as an inspiration and a guide, 
reduces it to the commonplaces of the world's 
thought, and degrades it and deprives it of its 
life-giving power. There is no better test of 
spiritual truth than spiritual f ruitfulness ; and in 
making our estimate of truth and falsehood we 
must take into account the spiritual as well as 
the logical faculties, the testimony of the intui- 
tions as well as the conclusions of the judgment. 

But, on the other hand, the question is not 
whether this Bible has in it some incidental in- 
accuracies and imperfections : whether some of its 



28 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

dates are wrong, some of its words and phrases 
mistranslated, miscopied, or even originally mis- 
chosen ; whether there are differences in detail in 
its parallel narratives, showing an absence of 
absolute and minute accuracy; whether there 
are, as a conservative theologian has conceived 
that there are, some specks of sandstone in the 
marble. The question is far more fundamental. 
How are we to regard the Bible ? How are we 
to regard inspiration and revelation? Are we 
to think that God has given us a perfect and 
infallible standard, something complete and per- 
fect from its inception ; or are we to think that 
he has given us a literature in which the mani- 
festations of his presence and power are unique, 
but in which they are made through men of like 
passions as we ourselves are, men who saw truth 
as in a glass darkly, men who knew in part 
and prophesied in part ? Is the Bible like the 
Northern Lights, flashing instantly and without 
premonition upon a world of darkness, and set- 
ting all the heavens aglow with its resplendent 
fire ; or is it like the sunrise, silvering first the 
mountain tops, gradually creeping down the val- 
leys, a progressive light, mingled with, yet grad- 
ually vanquishing the darkness, its pathway like 
that of the righteous man, growing brighter and 
brighter unto the perfect day ? 

The first of these opinions has been very gen- 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 29 

erally held in the churches born of the Refor- 
mation. The Reformers repudiated an infal- 
lible church, and, when asked what authority 
they would substitute therefor, replied, u The 
Bible." They did not indeed at first claim for 
the Bible, as we have it to-day, absolute iner- 
rancy. Luther almost contemptuously repudi- 
ated the Epistle of James as an epistle of straw. 1 
But as the battle between the Roman Catholic 
and the Protestant churches went on, the Pro- 
testant theologians, for polemical reasons, laid 
more and more stress on the authority of Scrip- 
ture, and the doctrine of infallible inspiration 
crept into the church. With it came the gen- 
eral claim for the Bible that it is an absolute 
and an infallible authority upon all subjects, — 
science, chronology, history, literature, rhetoric, 
theology. The revelation was regarded, more or 
less consistently, as a complete and perfect rev- 
elation given to Moses at the outset. Pagan 
beliefs and institutions parallel to those of the 
Mosaic dispensation were supposed to have been 
borrowed from Biblical revelation. The incon- 
sistency between the practices of Israel and this 
earlier revelation was regarded as degeneracy and 
apostasy, incidents of the Fall. The object of 
the prophets was supposed to be to reform and 

1 See, for further illustration, Hagenbach's History of Chris- 
tian Doctrine, sec. 243, note 1. 



30 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

restore the original revelation. And the New 
Testament was interpreted, not as an addition 
and enlargement to the spiritual knowledge of 
the world, but only as a revelation in a new 
form of the truth which the world had received 
in the Garden of Eden. 

No one any longer really believes this; but 
a great many attempt to believe it, or to make 
themselves believe that they believe it. Thus 
fragments of this belief still remain in an incon- 
gruous no-system of theology, fragments which 
it is well-nigh impossible to put together in a 
connected and coherent whole. As a system it 
cannot be described, but the fragments which 
remain of it, found in different systems, may be 
sketched by way of illustration. 

The man, then, who holds, or thinks he holds, 
or desires to hold this conception of the Bible, 
as a complete, perfect, and flawless revelation of 
divine truth from the beginning, finds in its 
first chapter a history of the creation which he 
regards as a divine revelation of the mode of the 
world's formation. This chapter declares that 
the world was made in six days by successive 
utterances of God, and that the writer may 
leave no doubt as to his meaning, he declares that 
evening and morning made each successive day. 
But our devout reader, who has begun by believ- 
ing the Bible to be an authority on natural sci- 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 31 

ence, abandons the earlier belief that the world 
was made by divine utterances in six days, be- 
cause all geological science establishes the con- 
trary beyond peradventure. First, he conceives 
that day means an epoch, and cites in support of 
his conclusion the statement that a thousand years 
are with the Lord as one day ; then he supposes 
with Hugh Miller that the revelation was not 
according to reality, but according to appear- 
ance, that the process of creation was seen in 
a vision by the inspired prophet ; and finally 
he modifies his original theory respecting the 
supreme authority of the Bible by concluding 
that it is not an authority in matters of natural 
science. He reads the story of man's creation 
and believes that he is infallibly taught that man 
was made out of the dust by a sculptor's process, 
six thousand years ago. Anthropology demon- 
strates to him that man has been upon the earth 
a considerably longer time than this, and he 
concludes, after ruminating upon this fact, that 
the Biblical chronology was introduced into the 
Bible in the time of Archbishop Usher, in the 
sixteenth century, and is not a part of its infal- 
lible revelation. He reads the story of the Fall, 
with its tree, the fruit of which was to make man 
immortal, with its weedless garden, and its talk- 
ing serpent, and its death following sin. He 
learns again from science that death has existed 



32 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

in the world from the beginning, and must have 
existed, that the immortality of man's body is an 
impossible conception, and that all science more 
and more tends to the conclusion that man as an 
animal has been developed by gradual processes 
from a lower animal condition. As in defend- 
ing his conception of a revelation perfect and 
complete from the beginning he first fought geo- 
logy as irreligious, and then the antiquity of 
man as irreligious, so now he is fighting the doc- 
trine of evolution as irreligious, not knowing to 
what new position he can retreat if his belief 
in the historical verity of the Fall is taken from 
him. 

He reads on in his Bible, and finds that the 
political laws of this book gave allowance to, if 
not direct approval of, polygamy and slavery. If 
he be a Mormon, he avails himself of its author- 
ity and pronounces polygamy a patriarchal insti- 
tution; if he be a slave-holder, he pronounces 
slavery to be a patriarchal institution ; but if he 
be neither, he concedes that these laws, giving an 
apparent sanction to lust and covetousness, are 
not divine ideals, but a concession to the infirm- 
ity of human flesh. In support of this position 
he cites Christ, but he fails to see that he has 
already conceded that the revelation is not the 
perfect and flawless manifestation of a divine 
ideal which at first he thought it to be. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 33 

It is quite possible that he passes by the ec- 
clesiastical laws altogether, but if he studies them 
he does not comply with them. The early rev- 
elation required circumcision; but his children 
are not circumcised. It required worship to be 
performed only in the Temple, or chiefly there, 
but he rightly believes one place to be as sacred 
as another. It forbade all conduct of public wor- 
ship except by the children of a single specified 
parentage, but in his church the conduct of pub- 
lic worship is thrown open to any man properly 
equipped, spiritually and intellectually, for the 
performance of that function. It provided as a 
form of worship a system of sacrifices ; the bleat- 
ing of sheep and the lowing of cattle mingled in 
the Temple with the chants of praise, and rivers 
of blood flowed underground from the sanctuary ; 
but in his church there are neither cattle, sheep, 
nor doves. And yet he thinks, or thinks that 
he thinks, that originally this ecclesiastical cult 
was framed in heaven and given to man, and he 
endeavors to preserve, or imagines that he en- 
deavors to preserve, some traces of it in his own 
worship. Baptism has taken the place of cir- 
cumcision ; in his prayers, though nowhere else, 
he calls his meeting-house a temple ; perhaps he 
calls his minister a priest, or, if Protestant pre- 
judices do not permit this, he confers upon him 
quasi priestly functions, which grow less and 



34 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

less, until at last the only clerical act which a 
layman may not perform is to pronounce a bene- 
diction, — as though a prayer for the blessing of 
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit on a con- 
gregation could be asked only by an ordained 
clergyman. His communion table he calls an 
altar ; possibly he even preserves in the service 
thereat, in the unbloody sacrifice of the Mass, an 
attenuated form of the Jewish sacrificial system ; 
or, banishing it from worship altogether, still 
clings to it tenaciously by insisting that in the 
creed the word sacrificial shall be coupled with 
the atonement. The evolutionist recognizes a 
spiritual continuity between the past and the 
present, and in the earlier forms a primitive ex- 
pression of that life of God in the soul of man 
which survives all changes of ritual ; but in spite 
of specious arguments, any man of common 
sense, putting side by side the Jewish ritual and 
the Puritan forms of worship, instantly perceives 
that the modern service is by no means conformed 
to the earlier one as to a complete, perfect, au- 
thoritative, and final revelation. 

Perhaps this student finally concludes that, 
as the Bible is not a final authority in science, so 
the Mosaic law is not a final authority in ecclesi- 
asticism. Perhaps, though he can find no author- 
ity for it whatever in either Christ or Paul, he 
assumes that the New Testament has abolished 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 35 

the ceremonial law, not one jot or tittle of which 
Christ declared should pass away until all be ful- 
filled. He makes his stand upon the decla- 
ration that the moral laws of the Old Testament 
constitute the final and authoritative word of God 
upon the subject of the moral life. But even to 
those moral laws he pays no literal obedience. 
Unless he is a Seventh Day Christian, he works 
on the seventh day with the rest of his neighbors, 
and takes another day in the week for his rest 
and his religious observances. In the chancel of 
his church, by the side of the law, "Thou shalt 
not make unto thee any graven image," he puts 
without hesitation the bas-relief of the last pas- 
tor. He finds himself involved by his theory in 
moral perplexities from which he endeavors in 
vain to escape. He reads the story miscalled the 
Sacrifice of Isaac, and no argument can make it 
seem to him really possible that God, who has 
implanted in every father's heart the command 
to protect his child, uttered to one father the 
command to kill his child. He reads in some 
imprecatory Psalm the prayer of the Psalmist 
that God will not forgive Israel's enemies; he 
reads the Sermon on the Mount, with its com- 
mand from the Master to love our enemies, and 
pray for those that injure us ; and no exegetical 
skill can make the two morally harmonious. 
How can the first be a complete and perfect 



36 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

transcription of the divine will, since the second 
flatly contradicts it? 

There is danger in skepticism, but there is 
greater danger in shams ; in making-believe be- 
lieve ; in trying to think something which is not 
really thinkable, or at least is not really thought ; 
in shutting our ears and our hearts to the truth 
which is knocking for admission. The Master 
never condemned honest doubt, but shams of all 
sorts were odious to him. He denounced the 
Pharisees who for a pretense made long prayers ; 
he put out of the room the hired mourners who 
simulated grief; and the dissimulating Judas 
Iscariot he bade depart, before he would com- 
mence his last sacred conference with his disci- 
ples. He who was the Truth could not endure 
a lie. Let us be true with ourselves, come what 
may to our theology. 

An infallible book is an impossible concep- 
tion, and to-day no one really believes that our 
present Bible is such a book. Theologians 
maintain, indeed, that the original utterances of 
the original writers were infallibly accurate, but 
we have not the original utterances of the origi- 
nal writers. An infallible book is a book which 
without any error whatever conveys truth from 
one mind to another mind. In order that the 
Bible should be infallible, the original writers 
must have been infallibly informed as to the 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 37 

truth ; they must have been able to express it in- 
fallibly ; they must have had a language which 
was an infallible vehicle for the communication 
of their thoughts ; after their death their manu- 
scripts must have been infallibly preserved and 
infallibly copied; when translation became nec- 
essary, the translators must have been able to 
give an infallible translation; and finally, the 
men who receive the book must be able infallibly 
to apprehend what was thus infallibly understood 
by the writers, infallibly communicated by them, 
infallibly preserved, infallibly copied, and infal- 
libly translated. Nothing less than this combi- 
nation would give us to-day an infallible Bible ; 
and no one believes that this infallible combi- 
nation exists. Whether the original writers in- 
fallibly understood the truth, or not, they had 
no infallible vehicle of communicating it : their 
manuscripts were not infallibly preserved or cop- 
ied or translated; and the sectarian differences 
which exist to-day afford an absolute demonstra- 
tion that we are not able infallibly to understand 
their meaning. 

God has not given us an infallible standard, 
but something far better, namely, a divine reve- 
lation. There is one relatively infallible book 
in the world, — Euclid's Geometry. It was 
written years before Christ, and, so far as I 
know, no material errors have been found in it 



38 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

from that day to this ; but it has exerted no such 
influence upon mankind as the Bible. It is in- 
errant, but it is not divine. The value of the 
Bible consists not in the supposed fact that there 
are no errors in it, but in this, that its books have 
been written by men who, with various degrees 
of clearness of vision, saw God in his world of 
nature and in his world of men, and were able to 
make others see him. It is God — God's truth, 
God's life — revealed in and imparted by the 
Bible which makes it a sacred book; and that 
impartation is all the better, and that revelation 
is all the clearer, because men were the media 
through which the life was imparted and the rev- 
elation was made, — men who saw the truth, as 
we see it, in a glass darkly, and who knew it, as 
we know it, in part only. 

As a collection of literature, the Bible is un- 
questionably the result of evolution. It is a 
library of sixty-six different books, written by 
between fifty and sixty different writers. If we 
assume, as I think we may, that the first writ- 
ings of the canon x date from the age of Moses and 
the last from the close of the first century, this 

1 I do not say books. Into the vexed question of the age of 
the Pentateuch I do not enter. But I do not doubt that it con- 
tains writings — the Ten Commandments, for example, and in 
my judgment much more — which date from the days of 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 39 

volume is the product of about sixteen centuries 
of national life. During these centuries, the 
religious teachers of Israel, the men who had 
in themselves that life of God which is the es- 
sence of religion, who perceived in themselves 
and in life such a manifestation of the Infinite 
as produced a real change in their moral nature, 
instructed the people concerning this life, occa- 
sionally by writing, generally by speech. Parts 
of what they spoke were by others reduced to 
writing; parts of what were thus reduced to 
writing were preserved; parts of what were thus 
preserved were incorporated in what is known 
as the Bible. This incorporation in a single 
volume was not effected at a definite date 1 nor 
by any well-defined authority. The process by 
which the books, both of the Old Testament 
and of the New Testament, were selected was a 
gradual one. The canon of the Old Testament, 
substantially as we now possess it, existed at 
the time of the translation of the Hebrew into 
the Septuagint, about the third century before 
Christ. But even to-day the Christian church is 
divided upon the question what constitutes that 
canon, Roman Catholic theologians, and some 

1 " For the opinion, often met with in modern books, that the 
canon of the Old Testament was closed by Ezra or in Ezra's 
time, there is no foundation in antiquity whatever." — Canon 
Driver, Introduction to the Old Testament, p. xxxi. 



40 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Protestant theologians, placing as high a value 
on the apocryphal books as on some of the so- 
called canonical books. 

The New Testament grew in a similar manner. 
At first the infant church depended on oral re- 
ports for a knowledge of the sayings and the acts 
of Christ. These were in time reduced to writ- 
ing by different biographers. The apostles from 
time to time wrote letters of counsel to the dif- 
ferent churches. These biographies and these 
letters were interchanged. Gradually the larger 
churches acquired a collection of these fragmen- 
tary writings. The first approximation to a 
canonical collection of these books dates from 
the second century of the Christian era, but it 
does not include all the books in the present 
canon, which did not assume its present form till 
the close of the fourth century ; nor is it possible 
to state exactly when or by whom the various 
books were first collected and formally recognized 
as one collection. Thus, both the Old Testament 
and the New Testament were constructed by a 
process of natural selection. As collections of 
literature both can be described, in terms of an 
evolutionary philosophy, as the result of a prac- 
tical process of selection and elimination, or as 
"a struggle for existence and a survival of the 
fittest." 

As the collection of books which constitutes 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 41 

the Bible was formed by a gradual process, so 
a gradual development is to be seen in the teach- 
ing contained in the collection. The later books 
present higher ideals of character and conduct, 
clearer and nobler conceptions of God, more 
catholic and more positive interpretations of his 
redeeming work in the world, than the earlier 
books. The revelation is a progressive revela- 
tion. The forms, whether of religious thought, 
of public worship, or of church order and organ- 
ization, in the Bible are not the same ; those of 
the later ages have grown out of those of the 
former ages, and are superior to them. In brief, 
the Bible is the history of the development of 
the life of God in the life of a peculiar people ; 
and it traces the development of that life from 
lower to higher and from simpler to more com- 
plex forms. It is the record of a spiritual evolu- 
tion ; of a clearer and ever clearer perception of 
the Infinite, under such manifestations as tend to 
produce a continually higher and stronger moral 
influence on the character and conduct of men. 
We can most easily trace this process of evolu- 
tion by considering the Bible in four aspects, as 
a volume of history, of laws, of ethics, and of 
theology. 

1. The book of Genesis is a collection of nar- 
ratives of prehistoric events. No one supposes 
that all of it was written by contemporaneous 



42 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

authors. Adam is not credited with the author- 
ship of the chapter about Eden, nor Noah with 
the story of the Deluge, nor Abraham with the 
record of the first great migration. The un- 
known author or editor of Genesis does not tell 
us how he obtained his knowledge of these events. 
He does not claim that the facts were revealed to 
him; and no later Biblical writer makes this 
claim for him. The natural presumption there- 
fore is that he obtained his information, as most 
writers obtain their information concerning 
events outside their own observation, by investi- 
gation, inquiry, and collation of preexisting ma- 
terial. Luke tells us how he obtained his know- 
ledge of the facts which make up his biography 
of Christ : he obtained them from others, who 
were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word. 
Presumptively, the writer of Genesis obtained 
his knowledge in a similar way, and this pre- 
sumption is greatly strengthened by two circum- 
stances. In the first place, a careful analysis of 
the book makes it clear that it is composed of 
two or more narratives which have been put to- 
gether by an editor. The book of Genesis is a 
Harmony analogous to the Harmonies of the 
Gospel, which have been composed at various 
times by piecing together in a continuous nar- 
rative the Four Gospels. In the second place, 
narratives of the Creation, the Temptation and 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 43 

Fall, and the Deluge, in important respects an- 
alogous to those in Genesis, are found in early 
traditions, some of them apparently older than 
even the most remote date assigned to Genesis 
by any scholar. The Hebrew prophet's account 
is unique, not because of the events narrated, 
but because of the spirit in which he has nar- 
rated them. He has taken the material as he 
found it, and with that material has re-written 
the early history of the world, and written God 
into it. 

"The first chapters of Genesis," says Lenor- 
mant, "constitute a 'Book of the Beginnings,' 
in accordance with the stories handed down in 
Israel from generation to generation, ever since 
the times of the Patriarchs, which in all its 
essential affirmations is parallel with the state- 
ments of the sacred books from the banks of the 
Euphrates and Tigris. But, if this is so, I shall 
perhaps be asked, Where then do you find the 
divine inspiration of the writers who made this 
archaeology, that supernatural help by which, as 
a Christian, you must believe them to have been 
guided? Where? In the absolutely new spirit 
which animates their narration, even though the 
form of it may have remained in almost every 
respect the same as among the neighboring na- 
tions. It is the same narrative, and in it the 
same episodes succeed one another in like man- 



44 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ner ; and yet one would be blind not to perceive 
that the signification has become altogether dif- 
ferent. The exuberant polytheism which en- 
cumbers these stories among the Chaldseans has 
been carefully eliminated, to give place to the 
severest monotheism. What formerly expressed 
naturalistic conceptions of a singular grossness, 
here becomes the garb of moral truths of the 
most exalted and most purely spiritual order. 
The essential features of the form of the tradi- 
tion have been preserved, and yet between the 
Bible and the sacred books of Chaldsea there is 
all the distance of one of the most tremendous 
revolutions which have ever been effected in 
human beliefs. Herein consists the miracle, 
and it is none the less amazing for being trans- 
posed. Others may seek to explain this by the 
simple, natural progress of the conscience of 
humanity; for myself, I do not hesitate to find 
in it the effect of a supernatural intervention of 
divine Providence, and I bow before the God 
who inspired the Law and the Prophets." 1 

The Christian evolutionist, with Lenormant, 
does not suppose that the facts narrated in the 
book of Genesis were supernaturally revealed to 
the historian. He finds for the writer no such 
claim anywhere in the Bible ; and he sees no rea- 

1 Beginnings of History, by Francis Lenormant. Charles 
Scribner's Sons. Preface, pp. xvi, xvii. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 45 

son to make such a claim in the writer's behalf. 
He supposes that a devout soul, who had in him- 
self the power of spiritual perception, and who 
saw God in his world, set himself to write the 
beginnings of history in such a way that those 
who were familiar with these prehistoric legends 
should hereafter see God to have been with the 
race from the beginning. He indicates this pur- 
pose in the opening sentences of his narrative : 
"In the beginning God created the heavens and 
the earth." The material universe, which the 
pagan nations deified and worshiped, he per- 
ceives to be the creation of a divine mind, and 
he so represents it. That depersonification of 
nature which Greek philosophy did not accom- 
plish till centuries later confronts us in the open- 
ing chapter of Genesis. Other religions taught 
man to fear natural phenomena as gods. This 
unknown prophet teaches that God made the 
world and all it contains, for man's habitation 
and use, and made man to exercise a divine con- 
trol over it. That God is the Creator of the 
world, that man is God's child, and is made in 

God's likeness, that sin is disobedience to God, i 

. i 

that penalty is separation from God and loss of 

the life of God, that God began redemption on 

the day in which man began to sin, — these are 

the lessons of the first chapter of Genesis : and 

they are equally valuable whether one believes or 



46 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

disbelieves that the description of creation in the 
first chapter of Genesis is scientifically accurate, 
or the account of the Garden of Eden in the 
third chapter of Genesis, with its miraculous life- 
giving fruit and its talking serpent, is histori- 
cally accurate. The lessons which the divinely 
inspired prophet found in life and wrote into the 
already current history of a prehistoric age are 
alike inspired, whether the scientific and histori- 
cal materials were revelations or traditions. 

This perception of God in history character- 
izes all the historic records of the Old Testa- 
ment. Abraham leaves the land of his nativity 
that he may find God and may worship him. 
Joseph illustrates faith in God alike in the dun- 
geon and in the palace. God proves himself in 
the plagues of Egypt above all the gods, and 
calls his people out of bondage that they may 
become the people of God. God fights for them 
and with them ; their victories are his victories, 
and their land the land which he has given 
them. And in all the subsequent history, from 
the colonial days through the days of imperial 
splendor, later division and degradation, and 
final exile and captivity, we have not the annals 
of a great nation, not the glorification of great 
leaders and the memorial of splendid achieve- 
ments, but history written by men who saw God 
in history, and wrote that they might enable us 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 47 

also to see him, as a God of righteousness. It is 
all written to elucidate the principle that " right- 
eousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach 
to any people." In this is the divineness of the 
Bible history : not in the accuracy of its chrono- 
logical and historical details, but in its percep- 
tion of the spiritual meaning of life's great 
drama. That meaning is not really less in the 
history of the United States than in that of Pal- 
estine ; but the Hebrew historians perceived that 
meaning, and so told the story that all readers 
perceive it. This constitutes the essential differ- 
ence between the Hebrew Scriptures and the 
modern press. In the Hebrew Bible is a per- 
ception of the Infinite manifesting himself in 
the national life ; in the American newspaper, 
for the most part, only a perception of party 
policies, politicians, strifes, defeats, and victo- 
ries. 

2. As Biblical history traces the development 
of the divine life in the nation, so Biblical laws 
exemplify the development of that life. The 
Levitical law is not a revealed code of worship 
to be literally obeyed by the Jews and symboli- 
cally obeyed by other peoples. Circumcision, 
temple, priesthood, altar, sacrifices, did not orig- 
inate with Moses, and were not confined to the 
Jewish people. The great lawgiver finds these 
forms of the religious life in the surrounding 



48 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

nations. He accepts them, gives them a new 
meaning, and adapts them to a higher and better 
life. A movable tent will serve as well for wor- 
ship as a splendid Temple; for wherever we 
gather to meet God in reverence and holy desire, 
there he is. The nation must have a priesthood, 
for to abolish it at this epoch in human history- 
would be to abolish all religious service and all 
that feeds and fosters the religious life ; but the 
priesthood are deprived of that power which in 
all lands and all ages has made it dangerous. 
The priests have no share in the ownership of 
the land ; and are made wholly dependent upon 
the voluntary offerings of the people, — volun- 
tary, I say, for though the amount to be con- 
tributed is definitely determined, there is no 
process provided for enforcing it as a tax. The 
priestly claim to be the sole teachers of the peo- 
ple is repudiated, and the teaching function is 
throughout Israel's history left to be exercised 
mainly by a wholly unorganized and unofficial 
body of prophets. Altars are prohibited; one 
only may be built ; and this of the simplest con- 
struction. " An altar of earth shalt thou make 
unto me; . . . and if thou wilt make me an 
altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn 
stone." Sacrifices are allowed; but the spirit 
which in pagan lands sacrificed prisoners, and 
offered hundreds of cattle and sheep is exorcised. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 49 

Human sacrifice is forbidden; sacrifices are 
never measured by their magnitude or value. A 
single bullock, or a lamb, or a pigeon, or even 
a sheaf of wheat, — anything will do, so that it 
be not some defective thing, of no use for other 
purposes, and so that it be offered in simplicity 
and sincerity. Any lawyer, subjecting the Le- 
vitical statutes to a lawyer's examination, would 
not hesitate to declare that they are regulative, 
not mandatory, that is, that their object is not 
to require altar, and sacrifice, and priesthood, 
but to regulate, restrain, and limit these eccle- 
siastical institutions already existing. 1 In the 
history of Israel there is the same controversy 
between ecclesiasticism and spirituality, high 
church and low church, ceremonialism and sim- 
plicity, which has characterized the church in 
all ages. A striking illustration is afforded by 
the 51st Psalm, in which the original prophet 
declares that " the sacrifices of God are a broken 
spirit," and a later priestly writer adds, with 
curious incongruity, "Build thou the walls of 
Jerusalem; then shalt thou be pleased with 
burnt offering and whole burnt offering." It is 
an addition quite in the spirit of much modern 

1 My authority for this statement is my brother, Austin 
Abbott, Dean of the New York University Law School. It 
is abundantly borne out by a careful and unprejudiced study 
of the laws. 



50 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

hymn tinkering. Mediaeval European history 
is, in this respect, almost an exact reproduction 
of mediaeval Jewish history. The priests are 
always urging the importance of Temple and 
altar and sacrifice ; the prophets are always in- 
sisting that these are valuable only as the instru- 
ments of a devout spirit, and that to obey is 
better than sacrifice. At last, with the coming 
of Christ, the whole system of sacrifice comes to 
an end. The sinners come to him, and he habit- 
ually bids them go in peace and sin no more. 
Only once does he send men to the Temple, and 
then as a sanitary measure, that the cure of their 
leprosy may be officially ascertained and pro- 
nounced. Not once does he bid a penitent to 
offer any sacrifice for his sins. 

The Christian evolutionist, then, does not see 
in the Levitical code a divine authority for a 
sacrificial system to be maintained in attenuated 
forms, as in a bloodless sacrifice of the Mass, or a 
perpetuated phrase in a creed. On the contrary, 
he takes account of the notion universally pre- 
vailing among pagan peoples, and not yet elimi- 
nated from Christian lands, that God must be 
appeased by pain and approached by sacrifice ; 
he sees in the Levitical code a permission of sac- 
rifices, because their abolition could not have 
been comprehended by a primitive and spiritu- 
ally uneducated people; but he also sees that 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 51 

these sacrifices are not so much commanded, or 
commended, as restrained, limited, and dimin- 
ished ; he sees prophet after prophet declaring, 
either that they are utterly valueless, or valuable 
only as the expression of religious feeling and 
purpose; he sees Christ, even when in close 
proximity to the Temple, disregarding the sacri- 
ficial system altogether in his treatment of re- 
pentant sinners ; he sees Paul declaring that we 
need no other sacrifice and no other mercy-seat 
than Christ. He believes that the sacrificial 
system represents a profound spiritual truth, 
the truth that it costs to forgive sin ; of this 
truth I shall have something to say in a subse- 
quent chapter. He recognizes in the ceremo- 
nial law of the Old Testament, not a law to be 
universally obeyed, either literally or symboli- 
cally, by all peoples, but part of a system of 
education, a " continuous progressive change," 
from that conception of God which regards him 
as an offended King, to be approached only in 
fear, with an offering and by a court ceremoni- 
alism, to that conception of God which regards 
him as a Father, to be approached with the un- 
ceremonious confidence* of unfrightened child- 
hood. 

The Christian evolutionist looks upon the 
political laws of the Jews in the same way. 
There are three great organic sins destructive 



52 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of any society which harbors them : war, which 
is destructive of national order, and while it 
lasts turns the nation into an armed camp ; slav- 
ery, which degrades labor and forbids the educa- 
tion of the laborers, that is, of the vast majority 
of the population ; and polygamy, which makes 
family life impossible, and in the individual sub- 
stitutes lust for love. These three organic sins 
are inevitably characteristic of the earlier and 
more barbaric states of society : for combative- 
ness, which is the inspiration of war; idleness, 
which is the inspiration of slavery; and lust, 
which is the inspiration of polygamy, are the 
three animal vices which are fastened upon man 
as he first issues from an animal condition. The 
evolutionist sees these facts clearly; but being 
an evolutionist he has more faith in education 
than in law, in growth than in manufacture, in 
other words, in resident forces working from 
within than in external forces operating from 
without. He does not think that it is the func- 
tion of government to enforce moral ideals upon 
an uneducated community by penal enactment. 
He sees therefore in the political law of the Jews 
the same evolution which he sees in their ecclesi- 
astical law. 

A prophetic lawgiver perceives that war is not 
an honorable avocation for a nation, and issues 
laws in restraint of war; he perceives that slav- 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 53 

ery cannot enrich a people, and issues laws in 
restraint of slavery ; he perceives that polygamy 
cannot promote welfare, and as a consequence 
issues laws in protection of womanhood. The 
evolutionist thinks no better, but rather worse, of 
slavery and polygamy because they are "patri- 
archal institutions ; " and he measures the Mosaic 
laws on the subject by their effect, which already 
in the time of Christ had been such as practically 
to abolish both the harem and the slave from 
loyal Jewish households, and has now made the 
Jewish people, whatever other faults they may 
possess, the most industrious and the most chaste 
people on the face of the globe. 

3. As the ecclesiastical and the political 
laws, so the moral laws of the Bible afford no 
perfect ideal of life at the outset, but show a 
"continuous and progressive change" from a 
simple to a more complex, from a lower to a 
higher law. There are certain fundamental 
principles which underlie all social order, the 
habitual violation of which can end in nothing 
but anarchy. These are such as the following : 
reverence for a righteous God as the only real 
Lawgiver, so that on the one hand the state has 
no right to enact or enforce a law not divine in 
its nature, and on the other the individual must 
obey, not because there is force to compel him, 
but because conscience requires obedience ; some 



54 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

stated time redeemed for self -development from 
toil and drudgery, else man sinks back into the 
animal and life becomes a prison house ; respect 
by children for parents, indispensable to home 
government, order, and training; respect by 
every man for the three great fundamental rights 
of his neighbor, — life, property, and family 
relationships. 

The Ten Commandments prohibit the more 
palpable violation of these principles. These 
commandments are not only wonderful expres- 
sions of social righteousness for that early age, 
but the principles embodied in them underlie all 
our modern criminal legislation. But they are 
not, and are not intended to be, final moral 
ideals for the life of the individual. One might 
keep each one of these statutes, except perhaps 
the last, and not be admitted to good society of 
to-day. He might not swear, but might be vul- 
gar and obscene. He might not commit adul- 
tery, but might be sensual, licentious, and an 
habitual drunkard. He might not steal, but 
might run a faro table or a lottery shop. 

Nor is it correct to say, as it sometimes has 
been said, that Christ gives to these command- 
ments a personal and spiritual interpretation, 
which clothes them with a different meaning. 
For Christ does not say, It hath been said to 
them of old time, Thou shalt not kill, and what 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 55 

they meant was, Thou shalt value life. He says, 
But I say unto you, Be not angry without a 
cause. He puts his law in sharp contrast 
with the ancient law. There is as little reason 
for saying that Christ re-affirms and spiritualizes 
the Ten Commandments, as there is for saying 
that he re-affirms and spiritualizes the law, An 
eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. 

The Ten Commandments are simply prohibi- 
tions of the more palpable violations of the laws 
of social well-being. They do not afford, and 
are not intended to afford, God's ideal of moral 
character or conduct. Later in Jewish history 
a higher ideal is presented ; in such utterances 
as, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
thy heart and soul and strength; " "Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself; " "Who shall as- 
cend unto the hill of the Lord, and who shall 
stand in his Holy Place? He that hath clean 
hands and a pure heart." Yet these are not the 
Christian ideal. When Christ is asked, Which 
is the great command of the Law ? and replies, 
" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart and soul and strength, and thy neighbor 
as thyself," he does not in his answer give his 
ideal of life. He simply repeats the Jewish 
ideal, as it is expressed in two general laws 
found in the Jewish books. To love one's neigh- 
bor as one's self is not the Christian law of love; 



56 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

it is the Jewish law of justice. Who am I, that 
I should expect better treatment than or higher 
regard from my neighbor than I accord to him? 
Christ's ideal is quite different. He gives it 
to his own disciples, in his last interview with 
them before his death. " A new commandment 
give I unto you," he says; "that ye love one 
another as I have loved you." Did he love his 
disciples only as he loved himself? He that 
beggared himself that he might make us rich, 
he that emptied himself of divinity that he 
might make us divine, he that lived and loved 
and suffered and died for those that were unwor- 
thy of his sacrifice, loved us far more than he 
loved himself. This ideal of love he left as a 
legacy for his followers ; and it is not an impos- 
sible one for us. Paul loved the Gentile world 
better than himself ; and every true missionary 
has done so. William of Orange loved his coun- 
try better than himself ; and every true patriot 
has done so. William Lloyd Garrison loved the 
enslaved better than he loved himself; and every 
true reformer has done so. The true mother 
loves her child better than herself; the nurse her 
patient; the martyr his church. It is not the 
Ten Commandments which should be put up in 
our churches, as the ideals of our moral life for 
us to pattern after. They are but the primitive 
prohibitions of the grosser sins against social 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 57 

order. In their place should be put the New 
Commandment, "That ye love one another as I 
have loved you." 

This conception of moral evolution in the Bible 
reconciles incongruities and relieves difficulties, 
which on the theory of a perfect and complete 
revelation at the outset are morally and intellec- 
tually unendurable. That God should tell a 
father to kill his child, it is impossible really to 
believe. He would be commanding by special 
edict what by a law written in the universal con- 
science he has prohibited. A few years ago a 
father sincerely believed that he had received 
such a command; and the community unani- 
mously adjudged him to be insane. But that in 
those early ages a devout father should know 
that he must consecrate his child, even his only 
begotten child, to God, and in his ignorance 
should imagine sacrifice by death to be the 
only possible form of such consecration, and that 
God should interpose to teach him, and through 
him his descendants, that life, not death, is the 
true consecration, — that it is not difficult to be- 
lieve. That God should command the children 
of Israel to exterminate the Canaanites, slaying 
men, women, and children, the same God whose 
patient love was manifested in the life and char- 
acter of Jesus Christ, it is impossible to believe. 
But it is quite possible to believe that in a 



58 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

primitive age a people should be inspired with 
an enthusiasm for righteousness by their proph- 
ets, and with a wholly sacred determination to 
destroy, root and branch, the iniquities which 
made the Canaanites the most corrupt nation 
of a corrupt age; and that they should be 
unable to see any other way of destroying the 
sin than by destroying the sinners, having no 
even remote conception of the possibility of con- 
verting and educating them. Even in the Chris- 
tian church in the nineteenth century, there is a 
very general unbelief in the efficacy of any mea- 
sures for the conversion of pagan peoples to a 
higher and purer life. It is impossible to believe 
that God, who through his Son bids his children 
"Love your enemies; do good to them who de- 
spitefully use you, and persecute you, that ye 
may be the children of your father which is in 
heaven," should have inspired a persecuted He- 
brew in exile to execrate Babylon with the words, 
" O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed ; 
happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou 
hast served us; happy shall he be that taketh 
and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." 
But it is not impossible to believe that a Hebrew, 
in this hour of utter bitterness, experiencing the 
cruel scorn of a people who derisively demanded 
of their captives an exhibition of their sacred 
psalmody, — somewhat as we sometimes call 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 59 

upon the North American Indians to amuse us 
with their war songs and their war dances, — 
in the very frankness of his soul should have 
breathed out to God the bitterness of a wholly- 
unchristian hate, and in so doing should have 
found relief. It is not the unknown author of 
the imprecatory Psalms who says "Follow me; " 
it is Christ ; and the imprecatory Psalms remain 
to show us out of what bitterness of feeling he 
delivers those that follow him. To go back 
from the Sermon on the Mount to the impreca- 
tory Psalms, and try to find a divine ideal in 
them, is as if Bunyan's Pilgrim should go back 
from the Land of Beulah to the Slough of De- 
spond, because he began his pilgrimage by floun- 
dering therein. 

4. The object of the Bible is primarily, not 
a revelation of law, either ecclesiastical, politi- 
cal, or moral, but a revelation of God. This 
revelation is both imperfect and progressive. It 
is imperfect, because it is the revelation of the 
infinite to the finite, and the finite cannot per- 
fectly comprehend the infinite ; it is progressive, 
because as man grows in spiritual and intellec- 
tual capacity, his apprehension of the infinite 
grows also. This proposition is as familiar to 
the student of theology as it is axiomatic. "If," 
says Professor Harris, "God reveals himself, it 
must be through the medium of the finite, and to 



60 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

finite beings. The revelation must be commen- 
surate with the medium through which it is made 
and with the development of the minds to whom 
it is made. Hence, both the revelation itself, 
and man's apprehension of the God revealed, 
must be progressive, and at any point of time 
incomplete. Hence, while it is the true God who 
^reveals himself, man's apprehension of God at 
different stages of his own development may be 
not only incomplete, but marred by gross mis- 
conception." 

The Bible illustrates this truth. The reve- 
lation of God grows both in clearness and in 
spiritual grandeur as man grows in capacity to 
receive and to communicate it. Moses' concep- 
tion of God is superior to that of Abraham, 
David's is superior to that of Moses, Isaiah's is 
superior to that of David, and Paul's is superior 
to that of Isaiah. 

The conception of creation bodied forth in 
the first chapter of Genesis is very different 
from that found in the Chaldean tablets or the 
Phoenician mythology; but the difference is re- 
ligious, not scientific; that is, it is a difference, 
not chiefly in the nature of the phenomena re- 
corded, but in the spirit in which they are re- 
corded and in the perception of the One whose 
nature they manifest and whose glory they ex- 
press. In the more ancient Chaldean tablets, 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 61 

chaos forms the gods; in Genesis, God out of 
chaos forms the world. In the Chaldean accounts 
of the creation of men, Belus "commanded one 
of the gods to cut off his head and mix the blood 
which flowed forth with earth, and form men 
therewith, and beasts that could bear the light. 
So man was made and was intelligent, being a 
partaker of the divine wisdom." 1 In Genesis, 
God forms man out of the dust of the earth and 
breathes into him the breath of the divine life. 
In brief, to quote Lenormant, the prehistoric 
narrative in Genesis is the same as in the Chal- 
dean tablets; "in it the same episodes succeed 
one another in the same manner; and yet one 
would be blind not to perceive that the signi- 
fication has become altogether different. The 
exuberant polytheism which encumbers these 
stories among the Chaldeans has been carefully 
eliminated to give place to the reverent monothe- 
ism." Thus the progressive revelation begins 
with the conception of God as the creator of the 
world, and of man as made in the image of God; 
therefore of God as spirit, and of matter as the 
creature of and subordinate to spirit. Yet this 
monotheism is by no means always clear at first. 
Generally God is represented as the one and 
only true God; sometimes, however, as only a 

1 Lenormant's Beginnings of History, p. 491. Rawlinson's 
Ancient Monarchies, vol. i. p. 143. 



62 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

God above all other gods. And while the former 
is certainly the view generally entertained and 
pressed upon the people by the prophets, the sec- 
ond is the view generally entertained among the 
people. It does not seem absurd to them to 
think that they cannot conquer the Philistines in 
the plains because their God is not the God of 
the plains ; nor to imagine that golden calves, 
representing the sacred bulls of Egypt, may 
serve to symbolize the gods that brought them 
up out of Egypt. It is at least a fair question 
whether the plural form Elohim (gods) used by 
one of the writers of Genesis is not an indication 
that the prevailing polytheism of the pagan na- 
tions had not in these earliest times entirely dis- 
appeared from the minds of even the inspired 
prophets. 

The monotheistic conception lays the founda- 
tion for the next step in the progress of the rev- 
elation of God to his people : this, namely, that 
God is a righteous God. The first distinct 
statement of this truth, to us so fundamental 
and even axiomatic, is in the narrative of Abra- 
ham's interview with God, and in this interview 
it is not asserted dogmatically, not assumed as 
axiomatic, but put in a tone of expostulation and 
entreaty: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth 
do right?" This conception of God as a God 
that is righteous and does right is brought clearly 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 63 

into prominence in the revelation to and through 
Moses. Even more than monotheism does this 
distinguish the religion of the Hebrews from that 
of the pagan nations. Out of this grows natu- 
rally and necessarily the conception of religion 
as righteousness. Unorthodox writers see this as 
clearly as the most orthodox. "The conditions 
of Jahveh's covenant with his people," says Re- 
nan, 1 "are exclusively moral; he recompenses 
them with prosperity in this world, giving it to 
those who please him, and the man who pleases 
him must be irreproachable. In order to enjoy 
a long life and to be happy, a man must avoid 
evil. The great step is taken. The old reli- 
gions, in which the god granted his blessings 
to those who offered him the first sacrifices and 
who most carefully observed the ritual of his 
worship, were quite left behind." 

Life often seems inconsistent with this faith in 
a righteous God who rewards righteousness and 
punishes sin. For often the righteous suffer and 
the wicked prosper. Out of this terrible trag- 
edy of life, this incongruity between life and the 
moral sense of man assuring him of the divine 
nature of righteousness, the drama of Job is con- 
structed. Only as it gradually dawns upon the 
spiritual vision that this is not all of life, and 
that another life may bring compensation and 

1 History of the People of Israel, ii. 336. 



64 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

adjust the unequal balances, does faith in the 
righteousness of God reassure itself. At first 
the most spiritual prophet cannot conceive that 
a righteous God should forgive sin. Overlook it 
he cannot ; and the cure of it by patient love is 
at first not seen at all, and later only dimly, im- 
perfectly, and gradually. Joshua, indeed, dis- 
tinctly tells the people that they cannot serve 
Jehovah because he will not forgive their sin; 
and Moses sometimes implies the same, some- 
times the reverse. Moreover, at first Jehovah is 
the God of the nation rather than the God of the 
individual. He is the God of Battles, the God 
of the Host of Israel, a Man of War, a Captain, 
a King ; he marches at the head of the nation, 
directs its campaigns, gives it the victory. In 
the earlier history he is rarely referred to by 
terms which indicate personal filial relations be- 
tween the soul and himself, as a Shepherd, a 
Father, a Friend. The phraseology of religion 
is that of the camp rather than that of the house- 
hold. But by David's time this new and ten- 
derer and deeper conception of God has begun 
to dawn on the mind of Israel. Repeatedly by 
the Psalmist is Jehovah addressed as "my God," 
a phrase apparently used but twice before 
David's time. In the Hebrew Psalter, God is 
seen to be a merciful God, a personal Friend 
redeeming even more than judging the world. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 65 

i; Who f orgiveth all thine iniquities ; 
Who healeth all thy diseases ; 
Who redeemeth thy life from destruction ; 

The Lord is full of compassion and gracious, 

Slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. 

He will not always chide ; 

Neither will he keep his anger for ever. 

He hath not dealt with us after our sins, 

Nor rewarded us after our iniquities. 

For as the heaven is high above the earth, 

So great is his mercy toward them that fear him. 

As far as the east is from the west, 

So far hath he removed our transgressions from us." 

Nothing like this, scarcely anything approxi- 
mating this, is to be found in the Pentateuch. 
The only even partial parallels are in Deutero- 
nomy, which there is at least good reason to be- 
lieve was written towards the close of the mon- 
archy. But even in the Psalms God is still the 
God of Israel; and still in the main the ground 
of appeal to him is the righteousness of him 
who appeals. It is not till Isaiah, the Second 
Isaiah, 1 that God is clearly revealed as a God 
whose mercy, as well as justice, extends to all 
the inhabitants of the earth. Israel is still the 
chosen people of God, but chosen to be a light 
to lighten the Gentiles. God is still a just God, 

1 Nearly all modern critics regard Isa. xl.-lxvi. as written 
a century later than the preceding portion of the book, and 
by another author, designated as the Great Unknown, or some- 
times as the Second Isaiah. 



66 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

but a God whose justice is mercy, and whose 
righteousness redeems. And a glimpse, the 
first in this resplendent progress of man's ac- 
quaintance with God, is given of that divine 
suffering love which is at once to judge and to 
redeem the world, in the person of the Suffering 
Servant of Jehovah, who bears the iniquities of 
Jehovah's people, and by his justice justifies 
many. 

Thus the Christian evolutionist sees in the 
Bible not a complete and perfect revelation of 
science, history, law, ethics, or even theology; he 
sees man gradually receiving God's revelation of 
himself. The Bible is not an infallible standard 
of truth or life. It is the history of the growth 
of man's consciousness of God. It is the ex- 
pression of God in human thought, God speak- 
ing to man and through man, God speaking 
through the selected writings of the selected 
prophets of a selected people. Thus it is truly a 
standard ; but not a final and infallible standard. 
Its history is composed, as other histories have 
been composed, out of such materials as were at 
hand or could be secured ; but the historian saw, 
what other contemporaneous historians did not 
see, God in his world, and wrote the history with 
God manifested in it. The laws, ceremonial and 
political, do not afford, and are not intended to 
afford, a final form for either worship or justice; 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 67 

they are suited to their times, and are such forms 
as are best adapted to express worship and to 
execute justice in a rude age and among a bar- 
barous people; and they are the more divine 
because they are not perfect, but are with divine 
compassion adapted to an early age and fitted to 
prepare for better days to come. The earliest 
moral laws are not ideals for the individual con- 
duct and character ; they embody such regula- 
tions as are necessary to social order, like the 
regulations in a school, without which order, 
and therefore intelligent progress, would be im- 
possible ; and they express such ideals as could 
be apprehended by man in the earlier stages of 
his moral development. Their value consists, 
not in the fact that they afford a moral standard 
for all time, but in the fact that they prepare 
men for a better standard in the future. And 
the earliest conceptions of God, while immeasur- 
ably superior to those embodied in the pagan 
literature about, and superior to many that even 
now prevail in intelligent circles in the United 
States, are inferior to those which are expressed 
in the experience of the later prophets. Each 
successive age sees God more clearly and inter- 
prets him more clearly than does its predeces- 
sor, until the fullness of time has come, and the 
Word no longer speaks through the broken ut- 
terances of men, but becomes incarnate. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 

The Old Theology. 

The Bible is a book of religion, not a book 
of theology. The questions which the Hebrew 
mind asked were questions of religion, not of 
theology. Let us recur to Max Miiller's defi- 
nition of religion: "Religion consists in the per- 
ception of the Infinite under such manifestations 
as are able to influence the moral character of 
man." The Hebrew prophets, then, sought for 
such a perception of the Infinite as would influ- 
ence the moral character of those to whom they 
spoke. They did not ask the question, What is 
God? but, What is the way to Him? Nor, 
What is the nature of sin ? but, How shall we get 
rid of it ? Nor, What is the origin of pain ? but, 
How shall we make a true spiritual use of it ? 
The Bible accordingly contains few or no defini- 
tions. None of God, unless "God is love" be 
regarded as a definition; none of sin, unless 
"Sin is lawlessness" be regarded as a defini- 
tion; none of faith, unless "Faith is the sub- 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 69 

stance of things hoped for, the evidence of 
things not seen," be regarded as a definition; 
and absolutely none of atonement, regeneration, 
the forgiveness of sin, the nature of Christ, or 
the divine attributes. 

The book of Job, if not in authorship the old- 
est in the Bible, undoubtedly represents the ear- 
liest religious life. It is a picture of Hebraic 
thought in its beginnings. If not written be- 
fore the Mosaic law, it is written to portray a 
prior state of society. There is in it no refer- 
ence to the Mosaic dispensation, to the sacrifices, 
to the Ten Commandments, or to any explicit 
revelation. It is a book of questionings, rather 
than of answers. Job is a theist, living before 
revelation. He has believed that God is a 
righteous God, and will reward righteousness 
and punish iniquity. He has been righteous, 
and yet he has suffered overwhelming disaster. 
When his friends insist that he must have sinned, 
otherwise this disaster would not have come upon 
him, he repudiates indignantly their explana- 
tion. He is too honest to pretend a confession 
which is not real. His utterances are the cry 
of a perplexed soul. He interprets the problem 
of life as it presents itself, not to the philoso- 
pher in his study, but to men and women in 
the actual experiences of their life. " Oh, that 
I knew where I might find him," he cries, "that 



70 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

I might come even unto his dwelling place. I 
would set in order my cause before him." Un- 
able to find God, he longs for some mediator 
who shall interpret him. "He is not a man 
as I am, that I should answer him, and we should 
come together in judgment. Neither is there 
any Daysman [i. e. mediator or umpire] betwixt 
us that might lay his hand upon us both." He 
longs for some clear revelation that will interpret 
to him the enigma of his own personal life, and 
will make clear to him what he should do. "Oh 
that I had the indictment which mine adversary 
had written; surely I would carry it upon my 
shoulder, I would bind it unto me as a crown." 
These are not the questions of philosophy, but of 
life. They are evoked out of spiritual struggle ; 
they are far profounder, more serious, more 
agonizing, than the questions which the philoso- 
pher calmly ponders in his study, surrounded by 
his volumes. 

To these questions the Hebrew prophets af- 
forded, even in the Old Testament, partial an- 
swers. They did not attempt to define God, 
but they did point the way to him. 

" Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord ? 
Or who shall stand in his holy place ? 
He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart ; 
Who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceit- 
fully. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 71 

He shall receive the blessing from the Lord, 
And righteousness from the God of Ins salvation." 

These prophets did not attempt to define the 
nature of sin, but they did point out the remedy. 

"Wash you; make you clean; put away the 
evil of your doings from before mine eyes ; cease 
to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment; re- 
lieve the oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead 
for the widow. Come now, and let us reason to- 
gether, saith the Lord : though your sins be as 
scarlet, they shall be as white as snow ; though 
they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." 

The prophets did not discuss the origin of 
pain. They did not puzzle themselves over the 
problem how, into a world governed by love, sin 
and suffering have come. They sought for peace 
in an experience of trust transcending knowledge. 

" Commit thy way unto the Lord ; 

Trust also in him ; and he shall bring" it to pass. 

And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, 

And thy judgment as the noonday. 

Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him : 

Fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way." 

To these practical questions of life, to which 
the Hebrew prophets gave partial and tentative 
answers, Jesus Christ gave answers fuller and 
more complete. He fulfilled the law and the 
prophets, that is, he filled out the outline sketch 
which they had made. He began his ministry 



72 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

by proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was at 
hand; then, in private conference with his dis- 
ciples, he told them that he was the long-prom- 
ised Messiah, come to bring that kingdom upon 
the earth; and finally, he assured them that it 
was through him that they were to come to God. 
"I have manifested the Father's name," he said 
to them. "He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father." He said nothing against the Jewish 
system of sacrifices; but he absolutely ignored 
it. When men came to him repentant, with the 
burden of their sin, he simply told them their 
sins were forgiven, and they were to arise and 
go their way and sin no more; but he never 
sent a penitent to the priest to offer a sin-offer- 
ing for his sins. More by his deeds than by 
his words he taught men that pain was not evil; 
that sanctified by love it was beneficent ; that it 
was a glorious thing to suffer for love's sake; 
that such love-suffering was to be coveted, not 
fled from ; and he bade his disciples take up the 
cross and follow him. Thus he answered the 
three great questions of religion : How to find 
God ; how to get rid of sin ; how to utilize suf- 
fering. But his silence was only less significant 
than his speech. Like the prophets who pre- 
ceded him, he preached religion, not theology. 
That is, he answered the vital questions of expe- 
rience, not the curious inquiries of the intellect. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 73 

He furnished no catalogue of divine attributes 
and no definition of the Infinite, but he told 
men the way to God. He did not discuss the 
nature of sin, nor its origin, nor in one single 
instance the relation of the individual to the 
race, to his ancestry, or to Adam. But he as- 
sured men that by breaking off their sins in 
righteousness they might find forgiveness and re- 
lief. He never discussed the question how pain 
entered into the world, but he gave to pain a 
new meaning and to the souls of men a new in- 
spiration, which made them eager to enter into 
it. Nowhere outside the church of Christ can 
one find such an expression as that of Paul, "I 
count all things but loss for the excellency of 
the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. . . . 
That I may know him, and the power of his 
resurrection, and the fellowship of his suffer- 
ings, being made conformable unto his death." 
In order to introduce Christianity into the 
Greek and Eoman world, it was as necessary 
that it should be re-cast into Greek and Eoman 
thought moulds as that it should be expressed in 
Greek and Roman language. For this re-cast- 
ing of it, the world is chiefly indebted to the 
Apostle Paul. Humanly speaking, Christianity 
would have been only a reformed Judaism, but 
for him. He did not add to Christianity, as 
some have imagined, nor did he corrupt it, as 



74 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

others have imagined ; neither did he simply re- 
iterate what Jesus Christ had taught in the forms 
in which Jesus Christ taught it. He translated 
Christianity from Hebrew into Greek and 
Roman forms of thought. He was the necessary 
link between the Hebraic and the Gentile world. 
Paul seems to me to have been greatly misun- 
derstood, alike by his admirers and his critics. 
He was not primarily a philosopher, loving the 
truth for its own sake and constructing it in 
carefully articulated systems. He had and ex- 
pressed a vigorous contempt for mere wisdom. 
In his writings there are few or no references to 
the philosophical systems of his time. He was 
not by nature a logician ; he did not reach his 
conclusions by labored processes of argument. 
He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, belonging 
by race and by his inherent religious spirit to a 
people who have given the world a David and 
an Isaiah. He was the last of the Hebrew pro- 
phets, a seer rather than a logician. His mind 
was more nearly of the type of Emerson or 
Goethe than of the type of Calvin or Thomas 
Aquinas. His life was not that of a philosopher, 
but that of an evangelist. He traveled from 
city to city, preaching the gospel. The churches 
which sprang up where he preached, he carried 
as a burden on his heart. He wrote to them 
practical letters of counsel. From these letters 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 75 

and from the evangelistic sermons of which we 
have fragmentary reports, his system of theology 
has to be deduced, as one might deduce a system 
of practical theology from the sermons of Dwight 
L. Moody, or George Whitefield. His logic is 
often defective, and it is always the logic of an 
advocate. He does not hesitate to use the arga- 
mentitm ad hominem. He appeals to the pre- 
conceived notions and the established prejudices 
of his hearers in order to secure their assent to 
the truths and principles which he is inculcating. 
Thus, in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters 
of Romans, he appeals to a people who believed 
in election, — believed that God had chosen the 
Jews as his peculiar people, and had passed by 
all the rest of mankind. Assuming the divine 
sovereignty, which was the fundamental postu- 
late of all Jewish theology, Paul argues from it 
that God has a right to elect the heathen and pass 
by the Jews, if he so chooses. He is not in these 
chapters arguing for election and confirming a 
narrow view of divine grace, but he is using a 
doctrine of election so firmly established in his 
auditors' hearts as to be ineradicable, in order to 
give them an enlarged conception of divine grace 
and lead them to the final conclusion that "God 
hath shut them all up together in unbelief that 
he might have mercy upon all." 

But while Paul was by nature a Hebrew and 



76 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

a prophet, he lived in a scholastic age and re- 
ceived a scholastic education. There were no 
prophets in Judaea, no poets in Greece. The 
greatest genius is at once a product and a cause 
of his times. In Paul, scholasticism overlaid a 
spiritual nature, and at the same time scholasti- 
cism was voluntarily chosen by a spiritual nature 
as an instrument for the production of spiritual 
realities. Thus this man, evangelist and prophet 
in his essential nature, was philosopher and scho- 
lastic and dialectician in his forms of thought, 
partly because education modified his nature, 
partly because it was his nature to be, as he him- 
self said, "all things to all men,' 9 if by any means 
he might save some. 

But the problems which interested him were 
the Hebraic rather than the Greek problems, 
the problems of religion, not those of intellectual 
curiosity : not the question how to define God, 
but how to find him ; not how to account for sin, 
but how to get rid of it; not how to explain the 
existence of suffering, but how to maintain a life 
of peace and joy in the midst of pain. That this 
was his purpose he has expressed again and again 
in the autobiographic aspirations for himself and 
for those to whom he ministered. His letters 
abound with such prayers as "That ye might be 
filled with all the fullness of God." "The very 
God of peace sanctify you wholly." "The peace 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 77 

of God which passeth all understanding keep 
your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." 
These are the utterances of a man the inspiration 
of whose life is, not curiosity to solve difficult 
thought problems, but a great desire to enrich in 
himself and in others the spiritual life of faith 
and hope and love. For the accomplishment of 
this purpose he translated Christ's answers to the 
great problems of our spiritual life into Greek 
and Roman forms of thought. The history of 
Christian theology is the history of the intermix- 
ture of his answers with pagan philosophy, and 
of the gradual process by which the gospel, as 
Christ proclaimed it and Paul interpreted it, 
pervaded, purified, and transformed pagan con- 
ceptions. 

The ancient world of thought may be divided 
into three classes: the Oriental or mystic, the 
Greek or philosophical, the Roman or legal. 
We shall perhaps best trace the progress of the 
Old Theology by considering it under these three 
aspects. 

1. The Oriental does not think, — he medi- 
tates ; the Occidental does not meditate, — he 
thinks. The object of the Oriental is vision, the 
object of the Occidental is action. To see God 
is the supreme religious desire of the one ; to do 
God's will is the supreme religious desire of the 
other. The combination of Orientalism with 



78 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Christianity gave gnosticism. The predominat- 
ing characteristic of gnosticism was its unreality. 
Matter had no real existence, or existence only 
as an emanation of pure thought. Sin and evil 
were not, they only seemed to be. The spiritual 
was the only actual ; all else was as the phantas- 
magoria of a dream. God was the only reality. 
God is good, therefore nothing but goodness 
really exists. Individualism is separation from 
God, and therefore evil. The end of religion is 
not life, that is, individuality, but absorption in 
God, that is, ceasing to live. In various forms 
this Orientalism has at times reappeared in the 
Christian church, usually as a reaction and pro- 
test against legalism and dogmatism. It is need- 
less here to trace its successive appearances as 
mysticism, pietism, quietism. In our own time 
a lingering survival of it is seen sometimes in 
spiritual experiences expressed in such a hymn as 

' c Oh to be nothing", nothing, 
Only to lie at his feet, 
A broken and empty vessel 
For the Master's service meet." 

Sometimes it appears in exotic forms of semi- 
religious philosophy, as in the spiritual exalta- 
tion which says, "Believe that you are righteous, 
and you are righteous," or even "Believe that 
you are well, and you are well." 

Between this Oriental gnosticism and the 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 79 

practical religion of the Old and New Testa- 
ments there is little in common. It is not a 
broken and empty vessel, but a whole and full 
one, which is for the Master's service meet. The 
life which Christ inspires leads to the prayer to 
be something, not nothing, and ever something 
more and more. The end of his religion is not 
absorption in God, but an individual life filled 
full of the spirit of God. Pain, disease, death, 
are not unreal evils to be imagined out of ex- 
istence ; they are blessed realities to be used by 
the spiritual soul in growing Godward. Sin 
and evil are not phantasmagoria, but terrible 
realities, and the battle against them to which 
we are called is the battle, not of an insane man 
with his dreams, but of soldiers against an 
actual foe. So, in spite of its occasional and 
episodical appearances in the Christian church, 
Oriental gnosticism has never gotten a foothold 
in Christendom ; and on the other hand, Chris- 
tianity, though its cradle was in the East, trav- 
eled not eastward but westward, and has never 
yet succeeded in pervading Oriental countries. 
Not its methods only, but its very principles and 
aims, are radically different from those of Orien- 
tal philosophy. 

2. The Greek mind was speculative. The 
Athenians, who "spent their time in nothing else, 
but either to tell or to hear some new thing," 



80 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

were characteristic Greeks. The problems of 
Greek philosophy were not like those of the He- 
brew prophets. The Hebrew asked, What shall 
I do? The Greek, What shall I think? So the 
Greeks looked to the new religion to tell them, 
What is God? What is sin ? What is the origin 
of evil? At the same time Christianity brought 
with it new problems, to the solution of which 
they set themselves. Paul said that Jesus 
Christ had come into the world to answer the 
question of the Altar to the Unknown God: 
"Whom ye ignorantly worship, him declare I 
unto you." Straightway the Greek began to 
ask, Who is this Christ, and what is his relation 
to the Infinite? Paul said that Jesus Christ is 
the power of God unto salvation. The Greek 
began to ask, What kind of power ? How does 
he effect salvation ? In what consists the efficacy 
of his life and death? To these and kindred 
speculative questions the Greeks gave their 
strength. The result was not primarily a right- 
eous life, but a philosophical system. The an- 
swer to speculative questions never does more 
than send the questioner back of the answer to 
ask a new question more difficult than before. 
The spirit of speculation was not allayed, but 
stimulated, by discussion, until finally the scho- 
lastic debates reached their climax in the extra- 
ordinary contradictions of the Athanasian Creed : 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 81 

" Whosoever will be saved : before all things 
it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith. 
Which faith except every one do keep whole 
and undefiled: without doubt he shall perish 
everlastingly. And the Catholic faith is this: 
That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity 
in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons: 
nor dividing the Substance (Essence). For 
there is one Person of the Father: another of 
the Son : and another of the Holy Ghost. The 
Father uncreate (uncreated) : the Son uncreate 
(uncreated) : and the Holy Ghost uncreate (un- 
created). The Father incomprehensible (unlim- 
ited): the Son incomprehensible (unlimited): 
and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible (unlimited 
or infinite). The Father eternal: the Son eter- 
nal : and the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet they 
are not three eternals : but one eternal. As also 
there are not three incomprehensibles (infinites), 
nor three uncreated : but one uncreated : and 
one incomprehensible (infinite). So likewise the 
Father is Almighty : the Son Almighty : and the 
Holy Ghost Almighty. And yet they are not 
three Almighties: but one Almighty. So the 
Father is God: the Son is God: and the Holy 
Ghost is God. And yet they are not three 
Gods : but one God. So likewise the Father is 
Lord : the Son Lord : and the Holy Ghost Lord. 
And yet not three Lords: but one Lord." 



82 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Whether these speculative answers to the 
speculative questions of the Greek mind are right 
or wrong, intelligible or unintelligible, pro- 
foundly significant or without real significance, 
I do not here inquire. Whatever opinion one 
may entertain of the creed as the embodiment of 
an intellectual system, it is perfectly clear that 
it does not answer, and does not even pretend 
to answer, the Hebrew questions, How shall I 
find God ? and How shall I become like him ? 
Be the answers true or false, they are intellec- 
tual answers to an intellectual problem. They 
are not and do not pretend to be spiritual an- 
swers to a spiritual problem. The difference 
between the Athanasian Creed and the Twenty- 
fourth Psalm, or the Parable of the Prodigal 
Son, is not a difference in philosophy, it is a 
difference between speculation and religion. 
The very nature of duty and life is differently 
regarded: in the teaching of Jesus Christ, duty 
consists in loving the Lord your God with all 
your heart and soul and strength, and your 
neighbor as yourself; in the Athanasian Creed 
it consists in believing certain enigmatical de- 
clarations respecting the interrelationships of 
the Infinite. Isaiah tells us, whoever will be 
saved must cease to do evil and learn to do 
well. The Athanasian Creed has nothing to 
say about ceasing to do evil or learning to do 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 83 

well. He that will be saved must think in a 
certain prescribed form of the Trinity. The 
nature of life and the conditions of salvation are 
quite different in the two documents. Religion 
has given place to theology. 

3. The Eoman mind was practical, not specu- 
lative; but it was also legal and governmental, 
not spiritual or religious. As the Oriental was 
given to dreams and the Greek to speculative 
thinking, so the Roman was given to problems 
of law and of government. The Roman solu- 
tion of those problems was as simple as it is to 
us unsatisfactory. There was one Emperor at 
the head of the Empire, absolute in his control 
of it, from whom issued edicts which were of 
binding force on all the citizens of that Empire. 
Loyalty to those edicts was the one virtue recog- 
nized in the Empire; disobedience to those 
edicts was visited by an inexorable penalty ; for- 
giveness was a personal pardon for a personal 
offense, and could ordinarily only be granted 
upon condition of some expiation or satisfaction 
of the violated law; and finally, access to the 
Emperor was for most men only through subor- 
dinate officials and intermediaries. 

Christianity entering Rome, and beginning 
there, its work of transformation, was in the 
process itself transformed. As theology in the 
Orient became mystical and imaginative, and 



84 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

in Greece speculative and philosophical, so in 
Rome it became forensic or governmental or 
imperial. By the very necessity of his intel- 
lectual condition, the Roman, as the Greek, was 
compelled to organize his religious philosophy 
along the lines in which he had been educated, 
and to which he was accustomed. He therefore 
thought of God as a great imperial Caesar, from 
whom all authority proceeded; absolute, but 
always righteous and always just. He conceived 
of laws as edicts or statutes proceeding from this 
imperial God, inexorable, certain to be admin- 
istered, against which no man could throw him- 
self without being destroyed in the collision. 
He thought of the Bible as a book of statutes, 
explaining and promulgating these edicts of the 
imperial God to the sons of men. It was essen- 
tial in his conception, therefore, that this stat- 
ute book should be without any error or any 
mistake. A mistake in the transcription of a 
statute of the legislature of the State of New 
York, if it does not absolutely vitiate the stat- 
ute, vitiates it for all practical purposes. We 
are to be governed by the written record of the 
will of the legislature, not by the unknown will 
which has been mistakenly reported. The 
Roman theology, therefore, conceived of the 
Bible as an absolute and inexorable record of 
the laws which this imperial God had issued for 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 85 

the government of his subjects. Sin was a vio- 
lation of this law, and must be punished; be- 
cause, if it were not punished, anarchy, disorder, 
and the disruption of this great divine empire 
would be the inevitable result. If any mercy 
were shown to the sinner, if he were pardoned, 
then something must be found that would be a 
substitute for this punishment, in order that jus- 
tice, the character of the imperial God, and the 
sanctity and the greatness of law might be main- 
tained. This God was too august and too remote 
to be immediately approached. Only through 
subalterns and intermediaries could he be 
reached. The Son must intercede with the Fa- 
ther, the Virgin Mary with the Son, the saints 
with the Virgin Mary, and finally the priests 
with the saints. Such, roughly sketched, was the 
system of Roman or imperial theology in its 
final development, as theologically organized by 
Augustine and ecclesiastically perfected by Hil- 
debrand. It differed from the Greek in that it 
undertook to answer the practical questions, 
How shall I approach God? How shall I be de- 
livered from the burden of sin? In this respect 
Augustinian theology was a distinct advance 
over Athanasian or even Nicene theology. But 
it borrowed the formulas of Roman government 
for its answers. It did not go with Christ to 
the family for a parable to interpret the relation 



86 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of God to humanity; it went to imperial Rome. 
Its God was not an All-Father, but an infinite 
and eternal emperor. Its government was not 
one of redeeming love, but of imperial, inexo- 
rable justice. The Roman theology was forged 
in the same fires and cast in the same mould as 
the Roman hierarchy ; and the two must event- 
ually stand or fall together. 

When the Reformation burst upon the world, 
all theology seemed at first to be swept away by 
this cyclone from the north. The Reformers 
were charged with being infidels and atheists. 
They were in some measure iconoclasts. Their 
movement was at first partially destructive. It 
was necessary to organize a new and reformed 
theology to take the place of the old. Then it 
was that John Calvin rose upon the world with 
his doctrine of divine sovereignty. He was the 
theological organizer of his epoch. His service 
to mankind is far more liable to be underesti- 
mated than overestimated. 

There is, he said in effect, no king but one ; 
no father but one. God alone is the universal 
King, the All-Father. Kings and hierarchies 
do but play at law-making ; he is the only Law- 
giver. Crowns and thrones and chairs are but 
toys; he is the only crowned and enthroned 
and sceptred One. From him all authority 
comes; in him all authority centres; to him 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 87 

all allegiance is due; his will is the final, ulti- 
mate, absolute fact in the universe. It cannot 
be questioned ; and from it there is no appeal and 
no escape. This is Calvinism, the doctrine of 
divine sovereignty; to be read in the light of 
the age, against whose dormant anarchy, awak- 
ening later in the French Revolution, it was a 
solemn protest. Nor can we say even now, in 
the United States of America, with its shallow 
doctrine of popular sovereignty, its cry of Vox 
populi vox Dei, its egotism of democracy, its 
Dead Sea fruit of anarchism, that there is no 
need to listen to and heed this protest of a 
solemn voice, reaffirming the sublime doctrine 
of the ancient Hebrew prophets, and itself re- 
affirmed by one of the least religiously minded 
of modern historians." 1 

John Calvin's service to humanity can never 
be forgotten. He was the prophet and foreran - 

1 "A king or a parliament enacts a law, and we imagine we 
are creating some new regulation to encounter unprecedented 
circumstances. The law itself which is applied to these cir- 
cumstances was enacted from eternity. It has its existence 
independent of us, and will enforce itself either to reward or 
punish, as the attitude which we assume towards it is wise or 
unwise. Our human laws are but copies, more or less imper- 
fect, of the eternal laws so far as we can read them, and 
either succeed and promote our welfare, or fail and bring con- 
fusion and disaster, according as the legislator's insight has 
detected the true principle, or has been distorted by igno- 
rance or selfishness." — J. A. Froude, Essay on Calvinism, 



88 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ner of civil and religious liberty. He built 
the bridge over which the church passed from a 
theocratic imperialism to republicanism^ for he 
showed that republicanism also might be theo- 
cratic. Nor was the doctrine of election, which 
he borrowed from Augustine and reaffirmed, the 
narrow and exclusive doctrine which it has often 
been thought to be. It is only in these later days 
that the Christian church is beginning to believe 
that "There's a wideness in God's mercy like 
the wideness of the sea." It has always believed 
in a doctrine of election. The Jews believed 
that God had chosen them as his people and had 
passed by the pagans. The Roman Catholic 
church believed that he chose the baptized as his 
people and passed by the unbaptized. In the 
Inferno, Dante finds in the outermost circle of 
hell the good and true of pagan nations who 
have not received baptism. Calvin preached a 
broader doctrine of election than that of either 
Judaism or Romanism. God has chosen, he 
said, whom he will, and whom he will he passeth 
by. The ground of his choice lies not in the 
accident of a race, it lies not in the chance of 
a baptism, it lies in his own inscrutable will. 
And he thus laid the foundation for the broader 
doctrine that God has chosen the whole human 
race, the doctrine of Paul that the grace of God 
is as universal and inclusive as the sinfulness of 
humanity. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 89 

But affirming the sovereignty of God, John 
Calvin denied the freedom of man. Any con- 
sistent system of philosophy must start either 
from the testimony of consciousness, accepting 
thereupon human freedom and human responsi- 
bility as final and ultimate facts, or it must start 
with the universality of law and the consequent 
absolute sovereignty of the lawgiver. Calvin's 
system was self-consistent. He declared that 
man had lost his freedom in the fall, and was free 
no more. Denying the freedom of man, he took 
away all incentive to activity, undermined the 
sense of personal responsibility by the sweeping 
universality of his indictment of the race, robbed 
the gospel of all power to convict the individ- 
ual, and laid the foundation for that philosophy 
of necessarianism which denies not only the re- 
ality, but the possibility, of a religious or even 
an ethical life. 1 This imperial theology, as in- 
terpreted by John Calvin and his great master 
and predecessor, has been so admirably described 
by James Martineau, 2 that I need make no 
apology for transferring his description to my 
pages, instead of essaying a description of my 
own. 

1 A man with a criminal nature and education, under given 
circumstances of temptation, can no more help committing 
crime than he could help having" a headache under certain con- 
ditions of brain and stomach. — J. Cotter Morison, The Ser- 
vice of Man, p. 289. 

2 Types of Ethical Theory, Intro, pp. 17, 18. 



90 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

"The Augustinian theology is founded upon 
a sense of sin so passionate and absolute as to 
plunge the conscience into unrelieved shadows. 
It pledges itself to find traces everywhere of the 
lost condition of humanity, in virtue of which 
there is no longer any freedom for good, and a 
hopeless taint is mingled with the very springs 
of our activity. This doctrine is evidently the 
utterance of a deep but despairing moral aspira- 
tion : it estimates with such stern purity the de- 
mands of the divine holiness upon us, that only 
the first man, fresh with unspoiled powers, was 
capable of fulfilling them; and since he was 
false, the sole opportunity of voluntary holiness 
has been thrown away, and we must live in hope- 
less knowledge of obligations which we cannot 
discharge. Hence there has never been more 
than one solitary hour of real probation for the 
human race ; during that hour there was a posi- 
tive trust committed to a capable will, and the 
young world was under genuine moral adminis- 
tration; but, ever since, evil only has been pos- 
sible to human volition, and good can pass no 
further than our dreams. It follows that, as 
the human game is already lost, we no longer 
live a probationary life, and can have no doc- 
trine of applied ethics which shall have the 
slightest religious value; the moralities, consid- 
ered as divine, are obsolete as Eden; and human 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 91 

nature, as it is, can produce no voluntary acts 
that are not relatively neutral, because uni- 
formly offensive, to the sentiment of God. Its 
restoration must proceed from sources extra- 
neous to the will; and unless snatched away in 
some fiery chariot of grace, it must gaze in 
vain upon the heaven that spreads its awful 
beauty above the earth. Thus a doctrine which 
begins with the highest proclamation of the di- 
vine moral law ends with practically supersed- 
ing it. The history of the universe opens with 
an act of probation and closes with one of re- 
tribution, but through every intervening mo- 
ment is destitute of moral conditions, and man, 
the central figure of the whole, — though a 
stately actor at the first, and an infinite recipient 
or victim at the last, — so falls through in the 
meanwhile between the powers that tempt and 
those that save him, that as an ethical agent he 
sinks into nonentity, and becomes the mere prize 
contended for by the spirits of darkness and of 
light. In this system the human personality, 
by the very intensity with which it burns at its 
own focus, consumes itself away; and the very 
attempt to idealize the severity and sanctity of 
the divine law does but cancel it from the act- 
ual, and banish it to the beginning and end of 
time. The man of to-day is no free individual- 
ity at all, but the mere meeting point of opposite 



92 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

forces foreign to his will; ruined by nature, res- 
cued by God, — with no range of power, there- 
fore none of responsibility between." 

The Roman or imperial system of religious 
doctrine, known sometimes from its origin as 
Latin theology, sometimes from its two greatest 
representatives as Augustinian or as Calvinistic 
theology, sometimes from its legal character as 
forensic theology, passed from Geneva into Eng- 
land, and from England and Scotland to New 
England and so became the Puritan theology. It 
is august, but terrible ; and equally worthy of 
the student's attention from the elements which 
it contained and those which it omitted. It put 
an end forever to the polytheism which had per- 
vaded Europe; it depersonified nature, brought 
it into subjection to man, and made its pheno- 
mena no longer an object of terror but of utility ; 
it gave a ground for and a sanctity to law, in its 
presentation of the divine Lawgiver; it laid a 
foundation for liberty by discovering a sanction 
for law in the universal conscience ; it empha- 
sized the reality and awfulness of sin, and the 
necessity of repentance and a new life. But it 
forgot that God is love, and knew him only as 
power ; it made both law and revelation exter- 
nal to man, not a power and a vision within 
him ; it made religion obedience to a government 
from without, not a new life working from 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY, 93 

within ; it made the church, and later the Bible, 
an authority imposed on men, not a voice evok- 
ing in the conscience a divine authority within ; 
and it denied the liberty of the individual will, 
and so destroyed the sense of moral responsibil- 
ity, paralyzed Christian activities, and fatally 
failed in the great work of a Christian theo- 
logy, that of promoting a missionary spirit. 
The great missionary movements which charac- 
terize the latter part of the nineteenth century 
originated in the Moravian -and the Methodist 
churches, each of them distinctively anti-Cal- 
vinistic. 

As the same social and intellectual forces 
which created the Roman hierarchy created the 
Roman theology, so the revival of intellectual 
and spiritual life, which emancipated the church 
from the former, is emancipating the church 
from the latter. This emancipation it should be 
our aim to facilitate, not to retard; but so to 
direct that it shall be an evolution, not a revolu- 
tion. The theology of the future ought to retain 
all of the truth which was successively contributed 
by Oriental, by Greek, and by Roman thought ; 
for in the evolution of Christian theology, each 
of these three phases of thought made a valu- 
able addition to the religious life of Christen- 
dom, — an addition which we cannot afford 
to despise and cast away. Oriental thought 



94 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

emphasized the transcendently important truth 
that spirit is more than matter, and is superior 
over matter," — a truth preeminently needed in 
this age, which lives by sight and scoffs at faith. 
Spiritual perception is as much to be trusted as 
sensual perception. We see moral truths as 
really as we see material substance, distinctions 
between right and wrong as truly as distinctions 
between red and yellow. Moral blindness is 
much more rare than color blindness. And 
if it be true that the world of sense is real, it 
is equally true that it is not the only reality. 
Greek thought emphasized the truth that re- 
ligion is rational, that all its articles of faith 
are consonant with each other and with reason; 
and it prepared the way for the construction of 
a self -consistent system of religious thought, a 
system which in all its parts would realize the 
fundamental truth that there is possible such a 
perception of the Infinite as will naturally influ- 
ence the mind and moral nature of men. It 
emphasized the truth of the divine immanence; 
that God is in his world of nature and in his 
world of men; and that he has manifested him- 
self in the one unique and incomparable Man ; 
and in all history by his Spirit speaking to and 
with men ; that he is in the world revealing him- 
self to the world, and by that revelation redeem- 
ing the world and making it a partaker of his 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 95 

nature. Roman thought emphasized the truth 
that God is transcendent ; that he is not nature 
nor humanity, and, though in nature and in hu- 
manity, yet transcends both ; that law is divine ; 
that man can neither make nor unmake it, but 
only discover and apply it ; and that sin is not 
a mere unripeness or immaturity, but a real 
and willful transgression of a real law, known 
and approved, though violated, by the sinner. 
Thus all three theologies contributed something 
toward the theology of the future : Orientalism, 
the reality of the spiritual and its corollaries; 
Grecism, the divine immanence and its corol- 
laries ; Romanism, the divine transcendence and 
its corollaries. The modern evolution of theo- 
logical thought, popularly known as the New 
Theology, is partly a continuation of these 
three elements in a new and larger system of 
thought than either one singly, and partly a re- 
vulsion from the purely scholastic and forensic 
questions of Greek and Roman thought to the 
more practical and spiritual questions of Hebraic 
thought : How shall I find God ? How get rid 
of sin? How utilize suffering? 

How this New Theology has been developed 
out of the Old, by that incursion of Teutonic 
life and thought into Latin and Greek Chris- 
tianity which led to the Reformation, will be the 
subject of consideration in the next chapter. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY (CONTINUED). 

The New Theology. 

The Lutheran Reformation was a North- 
Europe reaction against Roman imperialism, 
the protest of the Germanic race against eccle- 
siastical Caesarism; a great intellectual and 
spiritual awakening, due to a new interpreta- 
tion of Christianity by a people whose nature and 
traditions were individualistic. Its birthplace 
was Germany; its inspiration was Teutonic. 

Almost simultaneously with the protests 
against the papal authority and the demand for 
an open Bible were the discovery of a Western 
continent and a quickened commerce, the inven- 
tion of the printing-press and a revival and en- 
largement of literature, the birth of the scien- 
tific spirit and its application both to theoretical 
science and to the practical arts. Shakespeare 
and Cervantes, Gutenberg and Albert Diirer, 
Columbus and Copernicus, Loyola and Calvin, 
Xavier and Luther, were almost contemporaries. 
The first post-office, the first printing-press, the 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 97 

first telescope, the first spinning-wheel, were all 
nearly contemporaneous with the first open Bible 
and the first freedom of religious speech. These 
are not accidents. In history there are no acci- 
dents. The predominant principle of the Ee- 
formation, — the right of private judgment, — 
was more than a religious principle; certainly 
it had much more than a theological application. 
It was a revolt against authority. It threw 
humanity back upon its own resources. Eights 
are duties; and the right of private judgment 
laid upon mankind the duty of original investi- 
gation and inquiry. This right had first to be 
taught to man, who is always reluctant to take 
up a new right if it impose a new duty. The 
opportunity to exercise it had to be won in 
many a hard battle. It involved the wars in 
the Netherlands, the massacres in France, the 
civil wars in England. It cannot be said to be 
undisputed even now. 

But by the beginning of the present century 
in all Protestant Europe, and even in most of 
Eoman Catholic Europe, the right of man to 
think for himself had been established. It is 
still denied ; it is still punished with ecclesias- 
tical pains and penalties ; but it no longer in- 
volves a hazard of life or limb. With the pre- 
sent century there began, therefore, a new era 
of intellectual activity, an era of individual 



98 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

and independent thinking. Authority was dis- 
carded; not religious authority only, but all 
authority over intellectual processes. The mind 
may be fettered, or it may be free, but it cannot 
long be partly fettered and partly free. Free- 
dom is indivisible; and the right to think in 
either science, politics, or religion carried with 
it necessarily the right to think in each of the 
other departments of thought. Liberty to in- 
vestigate led to investigation. The Baconian 
philosophy was a natural and necessary produc- 
tion of the Lutheran Reformation; and a new 
science of life was the natural and necessary 
production of the Baconian philosophy. A 
fresh investigation was made into history. Rec- 
ords that had been unquestioned were subject to 
scrutiny. Niebuhr gave the world a new com- 
prehension, not merely of Roman events, but of 
all ancient history. Stories that had passed 
current for generations were subjected to a free, 
not to say an irreverent scrutiny. William 
Tell was declared to be a myth. Literature 
fared no better. Homer was abolished, and the 
Homeric ballads were attributed to an imper- 
sonal epoch. Shakespeare was reduced from 
the rank of a poet to that of an actor, and 
his plays were variously attributed to Bacon and 
to anonymous authors. Scientific theories which 
tradition had stamped as current coin in the 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 99 

intellectual realm were cast into the melting-pot 
for a new assay. Some radical errors were dis- 
covered; and each discovery made easier the 
work of the critic. Every hypothesis was sub- 
jected to suspicion. The whole body of scien- 
tific tradition was swept away by the same spirit 
which refused to own allegiance to ecclesiastical 
tradition. The scientific Talmuds were put away 
on the shelf as antique curiosities; and the 
world began an independent and direct investi- 
gation of phenomena, sometimes incited thereto 
by a spirit of iconoclastic egotism wholly un- 
scientific, but in the main inspired by a noble 
curiosity, an appetite for the truth. Harvey's 
discovery of the circulation of the blood led to 
a new physiology ; a new botany, a new astro- 
nomy, and a new biology followed. In the ma- 
terial sciences the text-books of ten years ago 
are already out of date. 

The students of psychology were the last to 
catch the new spirit of the age ; but they were 
not and could not be impervious to it. Plato was 
for a while closed, though we are beginning to 
open him again ; and the scholars, turning aside 
from a study of what other scholars had said 
about man, began to study man himself. Gall, 
Spurzheim, and Combe discovered the intimate 
relations of mind and brain, and developed a sci- 
ence of organology which, if it is somewhat crude 



100 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

and has sometimes been diverted to purposes of 
traveling charlatans, yet represents a profound 
truth which science is tardily beginning to recog- 
nize. Sir William Hamilton set an example of 
direct study of consciousness which modern psy- 
chology is carrying forward with valuable results. 
It would have been strange indeed if the reaction 
against the despotic authority of tradition had 
not produced some unhealthy contempt for it, 
and this doubtless was the case ; but we are get- 
ting beyond this first stage of the new era, and 
the sober-minded thinkers in all departments 
agree in condemning nihilism as no better in 
science or religion than in politics, and in com- 
mending the aphorism of Mr. Gladstone, "No 
greater calamity can happen to a people than to 
break utterly with its past." 

It would have been equally strange if the im- 
pulse to original investigation and independent 
judgment which was derived from the religious 
life had not in turn affected religious thought ; 
if, having learned in the school of conscience the 
right and duty of private judgment, mankind 
had made no attempt to exercise it in measuring 
the truth and value of all religious tradition ; if, 
renouncing the authority of the ancient church, 
it had bowed submissively to the authority of the 
more modern one ; if, in disowning the supremacy 
of the creeds of the past, it had not also dis- 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 101 

owned the supremacy of creeds fresh from the 
press; nay, if in its reaction, the same spirit 
of somewhat iconoclastic skepticism, which had 
repudiated Homer, should not also show itself 
in discussions respecting the Hebrew Scriptures. 
It was in the nature of things impossible that 
there should be a New Science, a New Politics, 
and a New Philosophy, and not also a New The- 
ology. The one is no more to be dreaded than 
the other; and the philosophic mind will be 
equally unready in each instance to rush to the 
conclusion that the new is wholly true or wholly 
false. 

At all events, as matter of historic fact, the 
same spirit of independent thought which set 
men to original investigation of the phenomena 
of vegetable, animal, social, and political life 
moved another class of thinkers to an indepen- 
dent investigation of the sources of religious 
truth and life ; and as Protestants regarded the 
Bible as one of these original sources, if not the 
chief source, the beginning of the present cen- 
tury witnessed in all Protestant Christendom the 
beginning of an original, systematic, and enthu- 
siastic study of the Bible. It had been studied 
before, but never with the same spirit mani- 
fested in the same degree. It was now for the 
first time $, study of independent investigation. 
Biblical criticism assumed a new significance 



102 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

and a new importance. The question of the 
authorship and composition of the books of the 
Bible, the object of the writers, the circum- 
stances under which they wrote, the audiences 
to which they spoke, have been studied anew and 
with valuable results. The libraries of Europe 
and even the monasteries of the East have been 
ransacked for manuscripts, and the manuscripts 
themselves have been collated and compared 
with an enthusiasm and a painstaking far greater 
than that bestowed on any secular writers of 
equal antiquity. The writings have been sub- 
jected to a minute and even a microscopic crit- 
ical examination, and a more comprehensive 
study of their general tenor has not been neg- 
lected. In the theological seminaries, at first in 
Germany, then in our own country, a new de- 
partment of " Biblical Theology " has been estab- 
lished, and the departments of Biblical Exegesis 
and Biblical Theology are coming to hold a place 
equal with, if not superior to, that of Systematic 
Theology, which had before dominated every 
seminary. New translations of the Scriptures 
have sprung up in every land; and these have 
proved themselves in England and America fore- 
runners of a new revision of the English ver- 
sion, undertaken by representatives of the entire 
Protestant church. Its scholarly qualities are 
indubitable, whatever objections to it may be 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 103 

made by a conservative spirit or a literary taste. 
A new class of commentators on the Scriptures 
has arisen, and a new class of commentaries 
has superseded their more polemical and less 
independent predecessors. Meyer in Germany, 
Godet in France, and Alford in England may 
not be abler as thinkers than Augustine or 
Calvin; but their spirit is radically different. 
They attempt neither to interpret Scripture in 
harmony with a preconceived theological system, 
nor even to deduce a theological system from 
Scripture — hardly to prove that it is self -con- 
sistent and harmonious. They simply endeavor 
to show the reader what the language of the 
sacred writers, properly interpreted, means, and 
leave him to deduce his own system. 1 Finally, 
the whole Protestant church in Europe and 
America agreed upon a course of study of the 
Bible in the Sabbath-schools, in a series of pre- 
arranged lessons ; and so wide is the interest in 
this course of Bible study that every religious 
newspaper, and some secular papers, print every 
week a commentary on the current lesson. These 
helps are naturally not always very scholarly, 

1 A striking- illustration of this is offered by Dean Alford's 
frank declaration that there is no authority in the New Testa- 
ment for the doctrine of apostolic succession. With this con- 
trast Calvin's constant thrust at the papacy in his Commenta- 
ries, which are as polemically Protestant as are his Institutes. 



104 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

the study in the Sabbath-school is not always 
very thorough, and the selection of the lessons 
themselves is not above criticism ; but the fact 
that several millions of children are simultane- 
ously engaged in a weekly study of the Bible, 
and that this Bible study has very generally 
usurped the place allotted a hundred years ago, 
or even less, to the catechism, is significant of 
the movement of the century away from tradi- 
tional authority towards independent investiga- 
tion in theology, as in all other sciences. More 
important than all is the concentrated attention 
which this study of the church has directed to- 
wards the life and character of Christ. One has 
only to compare Fleetwood's "Life of Christ" 
with any one of those which are to be found to- 
day upon any minister's book-shelves to perceive 
the difference in the theological spirit of the 
eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The 
past half-century has produced above a score 
of Lives of Christ. 1 Without concord of ac- 
tion they have appeared almost simultaneously 
in Germany, France, Holland, England, and 
America. They have been written by Jews, 
Rationalists, Liberal Christians, and strict Cal- 
vinists; they represent every attitude of mind 
— the coldly critical in Strauss, the rationalistic 

1 1 count on my own shelves twenty-five separate Lives of 
Christ ; and of course my collection is far from complete. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 105 

but reverent in Hooykaas, the dramatic and 
imaginative in Renan, the critically orthodox in 
Lange and Ebrard, the historical and scholarly 
in Geikie and Edersheim, the devout and popu- 
lar in Beecher, Hanna, and Farrar. It thus 
appears, from a merely cursory survey of the 
history of religious thought since the beginning 
of the present century, that the entire church 
has been engaged, to an extent never known 
before, and in a spirit never possible before, in a 
study of the Bible, and especially of the life of 
Christ. This study has been pursued by every 
school of thought and by every type of mind : 
by the rationalist and the orthodox, the critical 
and the devotional, the textual and the theo- 
logical, the gray-haired professor and the infant- 
class. And all of every age and every school 
have been engaged, though doubtless in differ- 
ent degrees both of independence and earnest- 
ness, in an original investigation of the source of 
Christian truth and life, and with a purpose to 
ascertain for themselves, and from the original 
sources, what are Christian truth and Christian 
life, as interpreted by Christ and his immedi- 
ate disciples. 

Now it is impossible that such a study could 
have been pursued for over half a century and 
not give us something new in both theology and 
ethics. It is impossible that such an intellectual 



106 THE EVOLUTION OF CHBISTIANITY. 

activity should exist and not produce some new 
and profound convictions, some new and clear 
apprehensions, and some new and crude notions 
which further study pursued in the same spirit 
will eventually correct. If half a century of 
study of the Bible — if, especially, half a century 
of study of the life and teachings of Jesus of 
Nazareth — did nothing to give the Christian 
student a clearer vision, a wider horizon, and a 
larger faith, hope, and charity, we might well 
begin to doubt whether either the Bible was the 
book, or Christ the person, we had thought; 
whether they were not correct who tell us that 
the world has outgrown the teaching of the one 
and the example of the other. If I have read 
aright the signs of the times, what is called the 
New Theology is not, properly speaking, a the- 
ology at all; it is certainly not a New England 
notion nor a German importation. It is the 
spirit of original investigation, characteristic of 
the age, applied to the elucidation of the prob- 
lems of religious thought and life ; it is a desire 
for a clearer understanding of the Christianity 
of Jesus Christ, and a quest for it in the ori- 
ginal sources of information. 

This new life led to certain sporadic protests 
against the Roman or forensic or Puritan the- 
ology, but these movements were both partial 
and local. The church of the New Jerusalem, 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 107 

popularly known from its founder as Sweden- 
borgianism, reintroduced into Christian theology 
some of the best elements of Orientalism : reem- 
phasized the reality of the spiritual life ; gave a 
more spiritual conception to heaven and hell; 
demanded that the Bible be read as a spiritual 
revelation, not as a book of external laws ; and 
was emphatic in its declaration that character is 
salvation, and that there is and can be no other. 
In a different form the same aspect of truth 
was received and emphasized by the Friends or 
Quakers. Methodism, born of the earlier Mo- 
ravianism, studying life from the point of view 
of human consciousness, accepted its testimony 
to human freedom, and by affirming what Calvin 
had denied, that man can repent and turn to 
God, gave a new and vital sense of sin, furnished 
a ground of responsibility, and inspired a new 
hope of life in man who had been made apathetic 
by the teachings of fatalism. The subsequent 
Oxford movement created simultaneously in 
the Anglican Church two counter-currents : one, 
reacting from the inconsistent position of semi- 
Protestantism, led back to the imperialism of 
Home, — its hierarchical authority, its ecclesi- 
astical system, and its theological dogmatism; 
the other, carrying Protestantism forward to its 
logical conclusion, led on to the doctrine that 
God is a living God, that all men are his chil- 



108 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

dren, that in every man is a capacity to hear 
God's voice and to receive his guidance, that the 
spiritual consciousness may be trusted, and is in 
the last analysis the seat of authority in religion. 
And finally, in Puritan England and New 
England, arose Universalism and Unitarianism, 
necessary products by reaction against the Puri- 
tan theologies: the one affirmed with Calvin 
that God can make all men righteous, and con- 
cluded with inexorable logic that he will, else 
he would not be a righteous God ; the other de- 
nied the Augustinian doctrine of native deprav- 
ity, and declared that man is by creation a Son 
of God ; and from this premise its more advanced 
section, by a natural though not necessary pro- 
cess of reasoning, passed on to deny altogether 
any necessity for a redemption divinely revealed, 
divinely authenticated, and operating with di- 
vine efficacy, to bring men into true filial rela- 
tions with God. These five movements, the 
Swedenborgian, the Friends, the Methodist, the 
Broad Church, and the Unitarian and Univer- 
salist, all of them drawing more or less from 
Oriental and Greek sources, have contributed to 
make that modern revolution in thought which 
is miscalled the New Theology. 

Not less, perhaps more potent than all, has 
been the influence of modern social and political 
life. That is characteristically democratic; 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 109 

not only in government, but in the arts and 
sciences, in education, and in religion. And an 
imperial theology cannot permanently remain 
unmodified in a democratic society. 

Nevertheless, this so-called New Theology is 
neither new nor a theology. It is not absolutely 
but only relatively new, — new only in contrast 
with the Puritan theology out of which it has 
sprung, and from which it is a reaction. It is 
not truly a theology, since its chief inspiration 
is a deep desire to get away from the questions 
of the purely speculative intellect, the answers 
to which constitute theology, to the practical 
questions of the Hebrew seers, the answers to 
which constitute religion. It may be roughly de- 
scribed as largely composed of three elements : a 
renaissance of Greek thought; a revival of the 
Hebraic spirit; and a spirit of humanism due 
to apparently triumphant democracy. Without 
attempting in this chapter to distinguish the 
various elements which have contributed to pro- 
ducing it, I endeavor here to give briefly its 
most characteristic features, describing what it 
aims to be rather than what it is, that is, de- 
scribing it as a tendency rather than as a fin- 
ished product. 

The church, then, is coming more and more to 
conceive of God, not as some one outside of his 
creation ruling over it, but as some one inside 



110 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

his creation ruling within it. In its material ap- 
plications this is a familiar truth — God not a 
mechanic who has built an engine and stands in 
the locomotive and holds the lever, turning off or 
on the steam, and regulating the machine as he 
will ; but God a spirit, and as a spirit indwelling 
in all that he has made. The organist sits at the 
instrument and plays upon it. He is not the 
organ. He ministers it, directs it, controls it. 
Presently he stops. The quartet rise and sing. 
They also use organs. Their own throats are the 
organs they use, and they can put into their 
music far more of their real spirit, because they 
are using themselves, than he can who uses but 
the tubes of tin or of wood. Now, we are com- 
ing to think of God as dwelling in nature as 
the spirit dwells in the body. Not that God 
and nature are identical; he transcends nature 
as I transcend my body, and am more than my 
body, and shall live on when my body is dust 
and ashes; nevertheless now ruling not over 
my body, but in my body. We are also com- 
ing to think of God as ruling, not only in phy- 
sical nature, but in a somewhat similar man- 
ner in human nature. The king rules over 
his subjects. The father rules in his children. 
The Czar of the Russias does not know those 
that are subject to his authority. He issues 
his laws. They are sent out every whither by 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. Ill 

messengers, and executed by subordinates. He 
does not and cannot put himself into the Rus- 
sians. All he can do is to tell them what they 
must do. He cannot transform them into a like- 
ness of himself. But the father, just in the 
measure that he is a father, can do this. He 
uses authority only as a means to this end. He 
does not say to his child, Thou shalt and Thou 
shalt not, any further than the infirmity of his 
nature compels him to do it. He puts his 
own nature into his children. They do not say, 
My father has made this law, I must obey it 
or suffer; but they come to think as he thinks, 
feel as he feels, love what he loves, have the 
ambition that he possesses, the purity that he 
possesses, the hopes and purposes that he pos- 
sesses; they become, as we say, "chips of the 
old block." Thus the new doctrine of divine 
sovereignty transcends the older doctrine. The 
conception of God that is in man surpasses the 
conception of God over man. The doctrine of 
evolution is not atheistic. The conception of 
God in nature and in humanity does not remove 
God from humanity. In olden times the Jews 
once a year went up to the great Temple to see 
their King ; subsequently once a week to the syn- 
agogue to see their King. But the child of God 
lives not under a king whom he can go to see 
only once a year or once a week; he lives with 



112 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

his Father; the child's life is the Father's life, 
and the child's will is naught save as he brings 
it into subjection, in every thought, every desire, 
every aspiration, to the Father's will. What 
does the bride mean when she promises to obey 
her husband? That the wife is to be the serf 
and the husband is to rule over her? No ! But 
that in the royal realm of love the wife will 
merge her will with her husband's will, so that, 
as life flows on, these two wills will become one 
will in the loyalty of love. The church is not 
the servant, it is the bride of God. 

This new conception of God, as immanent in 
nature, is necessarily accompanied by a new con- 
ception of law and miracles. Eather, we are 
going back to the New Testament conception 
and definition of miracles. They are no longer 
regarded as violations of natural law, or even as 
suspensions of natural law. Indeed, in strict- 
ness of speech, in the view of this philosophy, 
there are no natural laws to be violated or sus- 
pended. There is only one Force, that is God; 
law is but the habit of God's action; miracles 
are but the manifestation of his power and pres- 
ence in unexpected actions, demonstrating the 
existence of an intelligent Will and Power 
superior to that of man. I say that this is a 
recurrence to the New Testament conception and 
definition of miracles, for the writers of the New 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 113 

Testament knew nothing about nature and the 
supernatural, nothing about natural causes and 
the violation or suspension of natural laws. 
The words they used to characterize what we 
call miracles indicate their apprehension of these 
events. Four words were used by them: " won- 
ders," "powers," "works," and "signs" or 
"miracles." 1 Any event attracting attention 
and compelling ivonder, exhibiting unusual or 
more than human power, accomplishing a real 
work, usually beneficent, and serving as the 
sign of a special messenger and an authentica- 
tion of his message, is in the conception of the 
writers of the New Testament a miracle. As 
the New Theology believes that "all power be- 
longs to God," that God is immanent in the uni- 
verse, that there is no real distinction between 
the natural and the supernatural, that the only 
dualism is the material or physical and the im- 
material or spiritual, it has no difficulty in be- 
lieving that the control of the physical by the 
spiritual, and therefore of the universe by its 
God, is sometimes manifested by unexpected or 
unusual acts of power and wisdom for spiritual 
ends. These are miracles. Whether any parti- 
cular event reported as such a witness of divine 

1 The latter word is of course merely the transliteration of 
the Latin word miraculum, the Latin equivalent of seemeion, 
"sign." 



114 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

power actually took place is purely and simply 
a question of evidence. The New Theology has 
no hesitation, therefore, in accepting some mira- 
cles and rejecting others : in accepting, for ex- 
ample, the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a fact 
sufficiently authenticated ; doubting the resurrec- 
tion of the saints at the death of Christ, recorded 
only by Matthew, as insufficiently authenticated ; 
and disbelieving the historical character of the 
Jonah legend of the great fish, as not authenti- 
cated at all. 

As we are coming to think of God in men, not 
over men, so we are coming to think of the laws 
which God issues as in himself and in man, not 
apart from himself and over man: not less in- 
violable, but more inviolable ; not less certain, 
but more certain ; not as laws apart from man to 
which he must subject himself, but laws wrought 
into his nature and the very constitution of his 
being. We speak of laws of the State. They 
have been enacted by our legislators, some good, 
some bad, some indifferent. We speak of the 
laws of art, the laws of music, the laws of politi- 
cal economy, the laws of history. They have not 
been enacted by a legislative body. They are 
not statutes that have been enacted over art, 
over music, over industry ; they are inherent in 
the very nature of art, of music, of literature, 
of industry, of politics. Whether God wrote the 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 115 

Ten Commandments with his finger in the stone 
or not, and whatever that strange enigmatical 
declaration means, he wrote them in the very- 
nature of man when he made man. They are not 
something God has issued, saying, You must 
obey this : they are something God has wrought 
into the very fibre and structure of man's being. 
These laws are laws of man because they are the 
laws of God, and laws of God because they are 
laws of man, and because man and God are in 
very essence one. The laws of the sunbeam are 
the laws of the sun, because the sunbeam comes 
from the sun, bringing the laws of the sun and 
the nature of the sun, that it may warm and 
vivify the earth. And the laws of my nature 
are the laws of God's own nature because I come 
from God, have God's nature written in my 
members, and am a child of God, possessing my 
Father's nature. They are wrought into the 
very fibre and structure of the human soul ; in- 
violable, not because a divine imperial author- 
ity, sitting above, looks out on all the earth, 
and sees every violation and follows it with ar- 
rest and punishment, — inviolable, because they 
are inherent in the nature of man and inherent 
in the nature of God; so absolute and so invio- 
lable, that if we could conceive that God himself 
were dethroned and ceased to exist, law would 
still go on throughout eternity, unless nature it- 
self were dissolved into anarchy. 



116 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Hence, revelation is not a book external to 
men, giving laws which are external to men, by 
a God who is external to men. Revelation is 
the unveiling in human consciousness of that 
which God wrote in the human soul when he 
made it. In the spring I go to my garden bed, 
and write in the soil with my finger certain let- 
ters, and sow the proper seeds and cover them 
over, and there is nothing but a bed of mould. 
In June, from these seeds flowers will have 
sprung up, and they will have spelled out a name. 
The sun has revealed them. They were there, 
but the sun has made that to appear which but 
for the shining of the sun would not have ap- 
peared. So, in the heart of man God has writ- 
ten his message, his inviolable law and his mer- 
ciful redemption, because he has made the heart 
of man akin to the heart of God. Revelation 
is the upspringing of this life of law and love, 
of righteousness and mercy, under the influence 
of God's own personal presence and power. The 
question between the two schools of theology con- 
cerning the Bible is thus important and even 
fundamental. It is not whether there are some 
specks of sandstone in the marble. To the Old 
Theology, God, as a great infinite Caesar ruling 
the world, has framed certain statutes and given 
them to us, and we must obey them, or come into 
collision with him and suffer the threatened pen- 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 117 

alties. To the New Theology, he has made man 
after his own image and written his own nature 
in the human conscience and in human love, and 
then has interpreted by the mouth of his pro- 
phets what he has written in the hearts of his 
children. 

Such a revelation is not infallible; but it is 
for that very reason the more perfect revelation. 
It is said, If you think that the gold and the 
earth are mixed together in the Bible, how will 
you discriminate, how will you tell what is gold 
and what is earth ? We do not wish to discri- 
minate; we do not wish to separate. It is not 
gold with dross; it is oxygen with nitrogen. 
The oxygen is mixed with the nitrogen in order 
that it may the better be breathed, and the bet- 
ter minister to human life. In the Bible the 
divine is mingled — inextricably and indivisibly 
mingled — with the human, that humanity may 
receive it and be ministered to by it. We can- 
not take the great truths of God and his gov- 
ernment and his love into our own experiences 
except as they are woven into the experience 
of men of like passions and infirmities and im- 
perfections as ourselves. The Bible is a more 
sacred book because it is a human book. It 
is a diviner book, not merely because it shows 
us the law of God and the nature of God, but 
because it shows us God and man inextricably 



118 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

woven together so that they cannot be separated. 
It is impossible to run a knife of cleavage 
through the character of Jesus Christ, and say, 
"This was God, and this man." The glory of 
Christ's revelation of God to men is that he 
shows that God and man are so interwoven that 
separation is impossible. That which is true 
of incarnation is true of revelation; the divine 
glory of the Bible is that the truth and love and 
life and glory of God show themselves in human 
experience. Thus the Bible becomes not an 
end, but a means to an end. It is the glass in 
and through which we see God darkly. And 
all the better because darkly. If the glass were 
not smoked, we could not see the sun at all. Our 
faith is not in the book, but in the God to whom 
they bear witness whose lives and teachings are 
revealed in the book. We first hear the echo 
in prophet and epistle; then we listen for the 
Voice itself. Thus we follow our fathers, but 
it is that we may come to the Presence to which 
they came. The wings of God's own angels are 
over us, and the very presence of God himself 
is in our heart, and his eyes look love into our 
eyes, and his life is filling our life, and we will 
not go back to the portico of the Temple and the 
echo of the Voice. 

Faith in God has gradually brought with it 
faith in man as the son of God ; and faith in the 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 119 

power of man, — not of a few mystics, or espe- 
cially elected saints, or divinely appointed priests 
and prophets, — but faith in the power of man, 
and of every man, as a son of God, to know 
God directly and immediately. Imperialism in 
theology necessarily carried with it rationalism. 
Immanence in theology necessarily carries with 
it intuitionalism. In the United States, in the 
death of Dr. Emmons, in 1840, there died the 
last representative of the old school of New 
England preachers, the purely logical. A new 
school is taking its place, the intuitional. That 
man is a reasonable creature ; that the reason is 
the supreme and divine faculty ; that his reason 
is to be convinced by the truth ; that when his 
reason is convinced his will must obey; that 
when this result is reached he is a converted be- 
ing — this was the philosophy which, sometimes 
avowed, sometimes unrecognized, underlay the 
preaching of the old school. The whole fabric 
of the religious life was built by logical pro- 
cesses, by means of doctrine, on the human rea- 
son. But all men are not logical; and all men 
do not obey the truth, even when it is made 
clear to their logical understanding. The office 
of logic is to criticise rather than to enforce, and 
to enforce rather than to reveal. Spiritual truth 
is not mined by picks and beaten out by ham- 
mers. It is in the heavens, not buried in the 



120 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

earth ; to be seen, not mined. It is within, not 
without ; not to be arrived at by slow processes 
of deduction, but to be apprehended and appre- 
ciated upon a mere presentation of it. This far- 
reaching truth was spoken outside the church, 
in England by a Carlyle, and in America by an 
Emerson; its spiritual prophet in the Puritan 
churches of New England was Horace Bushnell. 
That truth is immediately and directly seen by 
the soul ; that God is no best hypothesis to ac- 
count for the phenomena of creation, but the 
soul's best friend, its Father, its intimate personal 
companion; that inspiration is no remote phe- 
nomenon, once attested by miracles, now forever 
silenced in the grave of a dead God, but a uni- 
versal and eternal communion between a living 
God and living souls ; that the forgiveness of sins 
is infinitely more than any theory of atonement, 
and that no theory of atonement can comprehend 
the full meaning of forgiveness of sins — these 
were not the theories of a philosopher ; they were 
the realities, the vital convictions, the personal 
experiences of the saint, whose sainthood must be 
in the heart of the critic before he can criticise 
and in the heart of the disciple before he can 
comprehend. 

Thus the New Theology, breaking away from 
the external and governmental conceptions of 
Eomanism, and through a revival of Orientalism 



TEE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY, 121 

getting a more spiritual conception of the teach- 
ing of the New Testament, uses both the church 
and the Bible as instruments for creating in the 
heart of men in the nineteenth century the same 
spiritual life which the Bible portrays in the 
hearts of the patriarchs and the prophets of olden 
time, and develops a style of preaching which 
appeals directly and immediately to the divine 
in humanity, and speaks with authority, because 
it evokes the authority of the divinity which is 
in every man. 

As the Latin or Puritan system of theology 
gave a conception of God, of law, and of revela- 
tion as external, so it represented sin, though 
less consistently, as external. For its concep- 
tion of sin was, substantially, that there is a 
great King who is absolutely righteous, and who 
has issued certain laws which ought to be 
obeyed, and that men have set their will against 
the will of this great King, and have deliber- 
ately determined that they will not do what he 
commands them to do. But, inasmuch as a 
great number, if not the great majority, of men 
are utterly unconscious of having set their will 
deliberately against the will of God, or of being 
in any wise in rebellion against him, this theo- 
logy ran back the history of sin to a supposed 
origin in a remote past ; it said there was a pro- 
genitor of this whole human race to whom this 



122 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

edict was given, who disobeyed it, and that in 
his sin we all sinned, and in his fall we all fell. 
By that one act the whole human race was 
brought into rebellion against God. We have 
accordingly, it was said, a state of society resem- 
bling that which existed in our Southern States 
twenty -five or more years ago. The world is in 
rebellion against God, and, although individ- 
uals may not have directly enlisted against the 
Almighty, they have been swept along by the 
current into this rebellion, and are really, even 
if unconsciously, rebels against him and his gov- 
ernment and laws. 

Three different causes are at work under- 
mining this theological system which makes sin 
for the race rest fundamentally upon one act of 
apostasy by a progenitor in some remote past. 
Evolution declares that the human race has not 
fallen from a higher estate to a lower, but is 
climbing from a lower estate to a higher. Mod- 
ern Biblical critics maintain that the story of 
the Fall is not and does not claim to be a reve- 
lation, but is a spiritualized account of an an- 
cient legend or myth, to be found in other lit- 
erature at least as ancient as the most ancient 
date attributed by any scholar to the author of 
Genesis. And students in sociology have dis- 
covered that the cause of crime is not a strong 
and rebellious will, but a weak and irresolute 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 123 

one. It does not follow that modern thought 
is coming to the conclusion that there is no real 
sin in the human race, no penalty following sin, 
and no need of forgiveness and redemption to 
deliver from both sin and penalty. On the 
contrary, I think we are coming to have a 
deeper and a diviner sense of sin ; a truer and a 
more practical conception of what sin is, and in 
what it does really consist. The laws of God 
are laws written in the human soul, and the sin 
of man is a sin against the law of his own na- 
ture. Sin is not man setting himself against 
a law external to himself. Every man is two 
men ; every man is a battle-ground in which the 
higher and the lower man are contending one 
against the other. Man has come up out of the 
lower condition, and in every new stage of his 
life he comes under a new and a diviner law, 
the law of a new and a diviner nature. He is 
no longer under the laws of his old being. The 
very standards of truth and righteousness change. 
In every new stage of evolution he comes under 
a new law of righteousness. Men are coming 
step by step into a higher and spiritual realm, 
and under the authority of a higher and spir- 
itual law. Sin is a relapse. Depravity lies in 
those elements of the old nature which makes 
such a relapse always a possible and real danger. 
"If ye were blind," says Christ, "ye should 



124 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

have no sin : but now ye say, We see ; therefore 
your sin remaineth." It is as we come up into 
the light that sin becomes possible. If there 
were no redemption, there would be no sin. 

I can remember, when a boy, how the minister 
used to exhort me to lay down the weapons of 
my rebellion. I did not know what he meant. 
I had no weapons of rebellion. I thought I was 
doubly wicked because I did not see that I was 
a rebel, though in very truth I cannot, looking 
back along my life, remember the time when I 
did not sincerely, in my deepest heart of hearts, 
desire to know the will of God and do the will 
of God. No ! I am not a rebel, and never have 
been. I repeat the language of the Episcopa- 
lian Confession: "I have done the things which 
I ought not to have done, and I have left un- 
done the things which I ought to have done." 
True ! and yet, after all, if my Father were to 
stop me, and say, "Make your inventory; tell 
me what things you did yesterday that you ought 
not to have done," I should often find it diffi- 
cult to put my finger on one of them; "Tell 
me what things you left undone yesterday that 
you ought to have done," I might not easily put 
my finger even on one of those. But when I 
come to the closing sentence of that triple decla- 
ration, "There is no health in me," it is in no 
figurative sense that I feel like putting my hand 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 125 

on my mouth and my mouth in the dust, and 
crying out, "Woe unto me, for I am unclean." 
It is not the things which I have done, it is 
not the things which I have left undone, that 
call me to repentance. It is the kind of being 
I am. I have not stained my hand with the 
blood of my neighbor. I have not put my 
hand into his pocket and filched his earnings. 
But, when I look into my heart, and see what 
there is of ambition and pride and selfishness and 
greed still hiding there, I do not know but that, 
if I had lived where my brother lives, my hand 
would be red as his is, my hand would be 
smirched with greed as his has been. I am 
haunted by another self. I hate no man except 
myself. And when this shadowy monster walks 
by my side and whispers the evil suggestion 
into my ear, I long to get my hand upon his 
throat and my feet upon his prostrate person ! 
It is not what I have done ; it is not what I have 
left undone : it is what there is left in me, that 
came I know not whence, that is here I know 
not why, and that somehow must be cleansed 
away before I am the man, God helping me, I 
mean to be. 1 

As we are coming, then, to think of sin not 
as successive acts of the will performed, and cer- 

1 This subject is more fully treated in a subsequent chapter 
on " The Evolution of the Individual Soul." 



126 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

tainly not as some great apostasy in the past in 
which we had no share, but as in elements of 
our being which are unworthy of those that are 
called the children of God, so we are coming to 
see that penalty is not external penalty inflicted 
by a governor for crime perpetrated. The law 
is in ourselves; the disease and the disorder are 
in ourselves; and the penalty is in ourselves. 
Every sin comes back to plague the sinner. 
There is no need of any flagellations ; every man 
flagellates himself. No God in heaven or devil 
in hell is needed to kindle the fire that is not 
quenched, or to breed the worm that dieth not. 
Every man kindles the fire and breeds the worm 
in his own soul. This is not new. The old 
Greek tragedians saw it, and wrought it into 
their tragedies. Dante saw it, and repeated it 
in the story of the Inferno. Shakespeare saw 
it, and revealed it in Macbeth and in Othello. 
Browning and Tennyson have seen and inter- 
preted it. That penalty and sin are both within 
the man ; that we never enter into heaven, but 
heaven into us ; that we never enter into hell, but 
hell into us — this, the vision of the poets, pagan 
and Christian, the church is beginning slowly 
and after long years of miseducation to appropri- 
ate and make its own. How this self-indulgent 
appetite vitiates and destroys the very tissues 
of the body and makes impossible the simple, 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 127 

natural, healthful pleasures of the physical or- 
ganization! How this grasping, greedy, cov- 
etous appetite grows by what it feeds on, until 
the man is consumed by the fire of his own in- 
satiable lust for wealth ! How this pride walls 
the man in, and isolates him, and separates him 
from his fellows ; how it incrusts him, and turns 
him from a living man into stone ! And this 
vanity that makes us desire the applause of our 
fellow-men, and puffs us up with conceit, how 
it deprives us of the pleasure we seek in the 
very process of our striving for their applause, 
and brings us into contempt in the very act by 
which we strive to gratify our vanity ! Nay, 
how all these sins isolate us from one another, 
and isolate us from God! Men build them- 
selves into narrow cells, inflict upon themselves 
the penalty of a perpetual solitary confinement, 
go out of the brotherhood, and estrange them- 
selves from their heavenly Father. No Peter 
stands at the heavenly gate to say who may 
come in and who may not. The gates of the 
Heavenly City are flung wide open day and 
night, and when men die they may go straight 
up to that gate and walk in — if they wish. 
But as men that dive to the bottom of the sea 
incase themselves in armor, and then going 
down are untouched by the sea, we, by our 
pride, our selfishness, our vanity, our self-con- 



128 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ceit, our appetites, so incase ourselves that, 
standing in the midst of purity and light and 
life, we are untouched by it, solitary in the 
kingdom of God on earth, solitary in the king- 
dom of God in heaven. 

If forgiveness of sin were taking away an 
external penalty threatened by an imperial God 
upon men for violation of an external law, then 
it could be taken away externally. But if pen- 
alty is sin and sin is penalty, if these are only 
two aspects of the same thing, different ways of 
spelling, as it were, the same word, then redemp- 
tion must be within, as the penalty is within and 
as the lawlessness is within. The man who is 
a battle-ground between the animal and the spir- 
itual can find peace only in one of two ways : 
either he must go back to the animal or he must 
go up to the heavenly. The man in whose na- 
ture appetite is struggling with self-respect and 
conscience must go back to the abyss or up to 
the Son of God, or remain torn in sunder eter- 
nally by these two conflicting motives that are 
within his soul. God himself cannot take the 
penalty out of a life and leave the sin in, unless 
he were to revolutionize the nature of man and 
his own nature. What God is doing in the 
world is not lifting off the threatened penalty 
from men that have done something wrong, but 
putting life into men who are as yet only half 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 129 

living, and taking the death out of men that are 
still half dead. There is not one single passage 
in the New Testament that in explicit terms 
promises remission of penalty ; but the Bible 
is written all over its pages with the radiant 
promise of the remission of sins. The function 
and aim of the gospel is to take the pride, the 
passion, the selfishness, the vanity, the vice, the 
sensuality, and whatever other evil thing there 
may be, out of the heart and out of the life. 
Redemption is within, not without. It is heal- 
ing. Not uncommon in forensic theology is the 
figure of the sinner shut up in his prison-house, 
and the messenger coming with the word of par- 
don signed and sealed in the blood of Christ, 
and the promise, If the prisoner will accept this 
pardon in faith and repentance, he may go free. 
But no such figure is found in the Bible. What 
are the figures there ? They are such as these : 
Your sins are a cloud in the heavens ; like the 
shining of the sun on the cloud is the shining of 
the life of God on the heart, and he will shine 
on, until he has blotted out every sin. Sin is 
like a record in a book : he will with chemicals 
erase the record and make the page white and 
ready for a new writing. The life is like that 
lived in some preexisting state; the man may 
be born again. Man is a slave to sin; God 
will set him free. Man is in his grave, and 



130 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

such corruption has taken hold of him that other 
men say, "Do not go near him, he is so cor- 
rupt; leave him to himself; " but Christ comes 
and stands at the grave and says: "Lazarus, 
come forth." To be redeemed is to come forth, 
now, out of that corruption, out of that dark- 
ness, into the bright shining of the sun, into 
the singing of the birds, into the immortal life 
that is here and now, the life with God and in 
God. The New Theology is not the doctrine 
that men need no forgiveness and no God to 
forgive them. It is profoundly the reverse; it 
is the doctrine that sin is wrought into the very 
fibre and structure of man, that penalty is a 
part of the sin and must exist so long as sin is 
there, and that forgiveness is casting the sin out 
and putting new life in. 

And so incarnation is not merely a coming of 
God to man, it is a dwelling of God in man. 
Universalism and Unitarianism were the nat- 
ural, if not the logical and necessary, conclu- 
sions of Calvinism. They were bred in the Pu- 
ritan atmosphere. They grew in the Puritan 
community. They were Presbyterian in Old 
England and Congregational in New England. 
They have never grown out of Methodism. 
Let the world believe that God is sovereign in 
any such sense as that man has no sovereignty 
left, and that whether he shall remain in sin 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 131 

and misery throughout eternity depends wholly 
upon God, and in no wise upon the individual 
man, — then whenever the world comes also to 
believe that God is love, it will inevitably be- 
lieve also in a universal salvation. Let the world 
think that God is on his throne apart from man, 
that what he is doing for men he is doing exter- 
nally for them, that a great gulf exists between 
God and man, that they are not of kin, that 
man's nature is not divine, is indeed undivine, 
and it will inevitably come to think of the Christ 
coming to earth as a messenger with an embas- 
sage from the sovereign to the rebels, telling 
them the terms on which humanity may be 
pardoned. But, on the other hand, let the 
world and the church come to believe that law 
and revelation and sin and redemption are all 
written in man, and it will come to write another 
word in man, and that word Incarnation, — God 
coming into one life in order that 'he may come 
into all lives; into one human experience, in 
order that he may enter into all human expe- 
riences ; Christ the door through which and by 
which man enters into God and God enters into 
man. As in the spring the first lily of the season 
puts its white head above the ground, then drops 
its head that it may whisper to its seed sisters, 
saying to them, "Come, come! this is what you 
are meant to be," so into the darkness of a 



132 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

pagan night, and into the vileness of a wholly- 
earthly history, came the one transcendent, 
pure, divine figure, standing for those few short 
years upon the earth, showing what is truly God 
by showing what is truly man when God is in 
him, and calling out to us, still in the earth- 
iness, still in the darkness, and saying to us, 
"Come! this is what you were meant to be, this 
is what God is trying to make you, this is what 
your aspirations mean. You are sons of God; 
the law of his nature is the law of your nature ; 
and, working with him and letting him work in 
you, you shall come out into the sunlight of 
God's own love and become the sharer of his 
own life." 

If we cannot state philosophically, and cannot 
even see quite clearly, how it is that the sacrifice 
of Christ works out this divine redemption in 
the human soul, at least we can see that there is 
no such Christian redemption except through 
the ministry of suffering. It is not that man 
is sacrificed to appease God — it is God who 
is sacrificed to redeem man. Christ could not 
have revealed a God of truth and not have 
been a teaching Christ; nor revealed a God of 
life and not have been a living Christ, carrying 
out in life the principles he inculcated; nor 
revealed a God of love and not have been a 
suffering Christ, for love must suffer so long as 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 133 

the loved one sins. Christ — who came that he 
might reveal the nature and heart of God, who 
came that he might show us God in man, help- 
ing man toward God — came to mingle his 
tears with our tears, and, sinless though he 
was, his vicarious repentance and his death to 
sin with our death in sin, in order that he 
might make it clear to us that God is always 
suffering and struggling and laboring with us. 
In the wonderful statue of the Laocoon, — the 
father and the two children, one on either side, 
and the serpents who have come up out of the 
sea to destroy them, — the father is fighting the 
serpents, not for his own life, but for his sons' 
lives. But the struggle and the anguish in their 
faces are less than in his, for love's battle is 
hotter and love's suffering greater than the bat- 
tle and the suffering of self. So out of that 
dark past, out of that animal nature, out of that 
strange mystery from which we were called by 
the creative word of God, who makes us of clay, 
yet breathes the breath of his own life into us, 
come the serpentine elements that are in our 
own complex nature, as if to strangle all that 
is divine and truly manly in us ; and it is our 
Father who is with us, and whose reflected 
image we see in the cross. The agony in the 
soul of the Christ is but the reflection of the 
sorrow that is in the Father's soul. Every 



134 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

burden of our life is in his life, and he wrestles 
for us and will conquer for us. It is not the 
omniscience nor the omnipotence of God that is 
most unfathomable, but his mercy, his sympa- 
thy, his love ; the sympathy of a God who is in 
such touch with humanity that we never com- 
mit a sin that he does not feel the shame of it, 
and we never feel a remorse that the bitterness 
of it does not enter into him, and we never 
know a sorrow that he does not sit down with 
us in our grief, and we are never lifted up with 
a great joy that he is not joyful also. For not' 
by the suffering only, but by the joy also; not 
by the struggle only, but by the peace also ; by 
the whole entering of God into human life, his 
life becomes our life, and we are made par- 
takers of his nature, because he comes down and 
makes himself partaker with us in our lives. 

Thus the New Theology is evolved out of the 
Old Theology, and the same spiritual faith is in 
them both. We believe that God is an abso- 
lute, supreme King ; but we know this King to 
be our Father, in personal relations with each 
one of us. We believe his laws are absolute, 
and not to be broken ; but they are his laws be- 
cause they are the laws of his own nature, and 
our laws because they are the laws of our nature, 
for we are the children of God and have come 
from him. We believe in a revelation that is 



THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 135 

written in a unique book, with a unique character 
and a unique history; but we believe that the 
writings in this book are but the reflection of 
that which was written by God in the inmost 
being of the prophets, and we see the vision bet- 
ter because we see it reflected from a mirror and 
in enigma. We believe in the awf ulness of sin ; 
not chiefly in the things which we have done, not 
chiefly in the things which we have left undone, 
but in the weakness, the infirmity, the animal- 
ism, the unworthiness that is in us, and that 
might sweep us out any moment into the abyss 
from which the hand of Providence has thus far 
guarded us. We believe in the certainty of 
punishment, not because by and by we shall be 
heard before an omniscient Judge; but because 
in man's own conscience is erected a judgment 
seat from which he never can escape unless he 
flies from his own nature. We believe in a 
great redemption; not one that opens the door 
of a prison and lets us out, but one that opens 
the door of our own self-erected prison and lets 
Christ in, and so fulfils in us the prayer of Ten- 
nyson, 

" Oh, for a man to arise in me, 
That the man that I am may cease to be ! " 

We believe in a sacrifice, not of a mediator to 
appease the wrath of God, but of God manifest 
in the flesh, sacrificing himself to purify and 
perfect the children of men. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 

Jesus Christ was the founder neither of reli- 
gion nor of a religion. If religion be the life of 
God in the soul of man, that existed long before 
Jesus Christ came into the world. Not to go 
outside of Judaism, it was seen in Abraham, 
Moses, David, Isaiah, and the long line of patri- 
archs and prophets of Jewish history. If reli- 
gion be such a manifestation of God as produces 
a moral influence on the life and character of 
man, that also had existed, both within and with- 
out Judaism, long prior to the time of Christ. 
Jesus Christ was not, therefore, the founder of 
religion. It was founded in the beginning, when 
God created man in his own image and breathed 
into him the breath of a spiritual life. Nor was 
he the founder of a religion. A religion, as dis- 
tinguished from religion, is a particular and 
organized type of the life of God in the soul 
of man. It is a particular form of moral and 
spiritual organization, resulting from some spe- 
cialized perception of that manifestation of God 
to man which is as universal as the race. Each 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 137 

religion has therefore its own specific expres- 
sion or embodiment : an intellectual expression 
in a creed or theological system ; an emotional 
expression in a ritual or liturgy ; and an organic 
expression in an institution or institutions. 
Christ gave to his disciples neither a creed, a 
liturgy, nor rules for the construction of an ec- 
clesiastical organization. He has told us very 
distinctly for what he came into the world. "I 
have come," he said, "that they might have life, 
and that they might have it more abundantly." 
"I give unto them eternal life." "Father, thou 
hast given thy Son power over all flesh, that he 
should give eternal life to as many as thou hast 
given him." He came that he might give life, 
and this life has expressed itself in intellectual 
forms, that is in creeds; in emotional forms, 
that is in liturgies ; in institutional forms, that 
is in churches. But he gave neither a creed, a 
liturgy, nor a church to the world. 

He assumed certain truths and gave expres- 
sion to them as truths of vital experience, but 
he never crystallized them into a creed. Thus 
he was accustomed to address God as his Fa- 
ther, and he told his disciples to do the same. 
He illustrated the relationship between God and 
man by that between a benignant father and an 
erring child. He said that God was more ready 
to impart his holy influence to those that desired 



138 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

it than an earthly father to give good gifts to his 
children. But he never described the attributes 
of God, nor afforded any theological definition of 
God, nor discussed philosophically the character 
of the Infinite One, or his relations to the finite 
creation. He assumed that men were bound 
together by a deeper relationship than that which 
finds expression in church, state, or even race. 
He passed beyond all these boundaries within 
which we still, for the most part, confine our 
sympathies. He skillfully awakened human re- 
gard, even in the breast of a narrow-minded Jew, 
for the renegade, apostate, and heretical Samar- 
itan, by picturing such an one with a compas- 
sionate and tender heart. But one looks in vain 
in his sayings for a definition of human brother- 
hood or a systematic philosophy of society. He 
treated men habitually as possessing immortal 
natures, — treated life here as a fragment whose 
consequences are projected into the hereafter; 
but he never discussed the doctrine of immor- 
tality, much less the specific conditions of the 
future state. One may, perhaps, out of his say- 
ings construct a Christian doctrine of Last 
Things, but he will have to construct it himself; 
he will not find it in the Gospels made ready to 
his hand. Jesus Christ lived at a time and in 
a country when sacrifices were the universal 
expression of worship, and access to God and 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 139 

relief from the burden and remorse of sin were 
supposed possible only through the shedding of 
blood. He said nothing against this sacrificial 
system, but when he saw in men the signs of a 
genuine repentance, he simply bade them go in 
peace and sin no more. He assumed that there 
was a provision by which the burdened soul 
might find peace, and that all that was necessary 
for that purpose was to abandon the sin and 
enter upon a new life. A doctrine of atonement 
may be deduced from his teaching, — has been 
deduced from his teaching, — but the doctrine 
of the atonement is a deduction. Christ no- 
where gives expression to it in a philosophical or 
doctrinal form. He assumed a position toward 
mankind of calm superiority. He never classed 
himself with men. He never expressed repent- 
ance for sin, or aspiration for a purer life. He 
acted as one who had come out of a great full- 
ness to impart to humanity in its great poverty. 
And yet the doctrine of the Person of Christ, 
though not stated in the teachings of Christ, 
may be deduced from them. That he left his 
claim to divinity unformulated, to be made for 
him by his followers, rather than by him for 
himself, is evident from a single significant cir- 
cumstance. When he was put on trial for his 
life, it was impossible to find two witnesses who 
could agree together concerning any utterance 



140 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of Jesus Christ which even a partial and preju- 
diced court could construe into an explicit claim 
of divinity; humanly speaking, it may safely 
be said that Christ could not have been con- 
demned for blasphemy, even by the corrupt 
court of Caiaphas, had he not consented to be 
put upon the stand himself and to have the oath 
administered to him, and then and there, un- 
der the solemn sanction of that oath, and with 
the death penalty hanging over him as the re- 
sult, declared that he was the Son of God, and 
would come in the clouds of glory to judge the 
world. 

As Jesus Christ formulated no creed, that is, 
no intellectual expression of the religious life, 
so he formulated no liturgy, that is, no emo- 
tional expression of the religious life. He was 
accustomed to pray, though generally in private. 
On at least one occasion, however, he met with 
his disciples and united with them in a simple 
service of prayer and praise about the Passover 
table. Once they asked him to give them a 
liturgy. He answered in an incomparable form 
of prayer which includes the common wants of 
humanity, its need of food, of forgiveness, and 
of guidance, expressed in three very simple pe- 
titions; but that neither he nor his disciples 
laid stress upon the form of words is evident 
from the fact that the form differs in the two 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 141 

reports which have been preserved for us, while 
the indications are that the prayer itself was in 
part, at least, composed of petitions which were 
before current in Jewish worship. The Jews 
were accustomed to baptize proselytes from 
heathen communities, as a token that the bap- 
tized washed away their old superstitions and 
entered a new life; John the Baptist, seizing 
on this familiar rite, declared that the Jews 
as well as pagans needed purification, and he 
used baptism to enforce this teaching. Some of 
Christ's disciples followed John's example, and 
Christ, after his resurrection, bade them use this 
symbol among all people, regardless of race, 
and as a form of initiation, not into Judaism, 
nor into a sect of reformed Jews, but into a 
universal and divine fellowship . The birthday 
of the Jewish nation was celebrated by a great 
festival, one feature of it being a supper. Jesus 
Christ bade his followers in the future remem- 
ber him whenever they thus celebrated their 
nation's birthday. In neither case did he create 
or institute a ceremonial ; he simply gave a new 
and deeper significance and direction to one al- 
ready familiar. In brief, Jesus Christ inspired 
his disciples with reverence, with aspiration, 
with thanksgiving, with love ; but he left them 
to express that spiritual life which he had im- 
parted to them in language of their own. 



142 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

In a similar manner he organized no insti- 
tutions of religion. Early in his ministry, he 
called about him from his followers twelve to be 
his more immediate companions. A little later 
he sent them out two by two, to tell the people 
in the villages and rural districts that the King- 
dom of God was at hand, while he carried the 
same message to the towns and cities. Sub- 
sequently he retreated from the crowd which 
thronged about him in Galilee, and seeking 
retirement with these twelve, devoted several 
weeks to giving them instruction concerning the 
spirit which should actuate them and the prin- 
ciples which should guide them, in carrying on 
his work after he was gone. Still later, in a 
wider district, with a more scattered popula- 
tion, he sent out seventy itinerant prophets on 
an evangelistic mission. After his death and 
resurrection, he met those who had remained 
loyal to him, and told them to continue their 
ministry, and to carry unto others the new life 
which they had received from him. But he 
organized no society, formulated no constitu- 
tion, appointed no officers, prescribed no rules. 
He left the life to create its own ecclesiastical 
organization, as he left it to find its own intel- 
lectual and emotional expression. 

The reason for this is not far to seek. Paul 
has explicitly stated it. Prophecies, he says, 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 143 

shall fail, tongues shall cease, knowledge shall 
vanish away, but faith, hope, love, abide forever. 
Even inspired teaching, and all the forms in 
which it may utter itself, and all the articu- 
lated knowledge of which it is the expression, 
are evanescent. These are phenomena, and 
phenomena always are and always must be tran- 
sitory. What abides, — what only can abide, 
— is life. It was this life which Jesus Christ 
came to impart, the life of faith, looking through 
visible things as through a veil, to the invisible 
glory which the visible at once conceals and dis- 
closes; the life of hope looking forward and 
upward in the expectation of a to-morrow that 
shall be better than to-day ; the life of love seek- 
ing not its own welfare, but the welfare of 
others. This threefold spirit is eternal and con- 
stant, while all expressions of this threefold 
spirit are transitory and changeful. Christ in- 
stituted no ecclesiastical organism, framed no 
constitution, prescribed no rules, appointed no 
officers ; but he gave in various ways expression 
to this spirit of faith, and hope, and love, as 
a spirit that must embody itself in a church 
which after his death should carry on his work. 

But he did more than this. 

The Jews in the Wilderness had instituted a 
Great Congregation which assembled on certain 
occasions for the determination of great national 



144 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

questions. Whether the Jewish commonwealth 
was a free democracy and all the people assem- 
bled for the purpose of mutual conference and 
public decision, or whether it was a republic 
and this Great Congregation was a representa- 
tive body is not altogether certain. Probably 
in the earlier history it was a popular assembly, 
in the later history a representative assembly. 
It was, at all events, the representative of the 
nation, and its action reflected the national will. 
In the Greek version of the Scriptures the name 
Ecclesia, meaning the Called Forth, was given 
to this assembly. The same name was given in 
Greece to an analogous assembly of the people 
for national consultation and common action. 
Christ implied that his followers were to consti- 
tute themselves into such an Ecclesia or assem- 
bly. The principles which he indicated as essen- 
tial to its existence and efficiency are these : — 

1. There was to be a church, that is, a gather- 
ing together, of all loyal followers of the Master. 
The bond which was to unite this assembly in 
one great brotherhood was to be loyalty, — not 
to a creed, not to an order or an organization, 
but to a Person, and that Person himself. 

The sole condition of admission to this bro- 
therhood while Christ lived was personal loyalty 
to him. In no solitary instance did he ask any 
would-be disciple what he believed, or where or 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 145 

how he worshiped, or to what nation or religion 
he belonged. 1 He simply asked, Are you will- 
ing to enter my school and learn of me ; enter 
my kingdom and obey my directions? He was 
equally willing to welcome to his organization 
the devout John, the rough, sailor-like, profane 
Peter, the publican Matthew, the pagan centu- 
rion. On the other hand, the scribe who would 
follow him provided he might first go back to 
his home to bury his father, or bid his kinsfolk 
good-by; the ruler of the synagogue who would 
join him, provided he might still keep the con- 
trol and administration of his own wealth; the 
Nicodemus, master in Israel, who was interested 
in his teaching but thought himself in no need of 
a new life, were rejected. And when crowds 
thronged about him with a great enthusiasm, he 
turned to them and declared that unless they 
loved him more than father or mother or life 
itself, they were not worthy of him. If they 
would be his followers, they must take up the 
cross daily and follow him. He required of 
those within the church the same spirit of abso- 
lute and unquestioning loyalty. When one of 

1 The case of the Syro-Phcenician woman (Mark vii. 24-30) 
may be thought to be an exception ; but she was not seeking 
to enter Christ's body of followers as herself a follower, and 
it is clear from the context that Christ's first refusal to cure 
her daughter was because granting the cure sought for was 
sure to destroy that rest and privacy which he was seeking. 



146 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

his best friends rebuked him for foretelling his 
own crucifixion, he vouchsafed no explanation, 
but turned upon the recalcitrant disciple with a 
sharp rebuke. "Get thee behind me, Satan," 
he said. When two other friends came to ask 
for honorable position in the coming kingdom, 
he answered with a test of their loyalty, "Are 
ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink 
of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I 
am baptized with? " He sat down at the table 
with his disciples, no one of whom had thought 
to offer his services in washing the soiled feet 
of the others, or even of the Master himself, 
When he rose, girded himself as a slave, and 
proceeded with basin and towel to wash and 
wipe the feet of the disciples, and one pro- 
tested, he answered simply, I will give you no 
explanation ; you must submit or leave the disci- 
pleship. When, after his resurrection, he fore- 
told the martyrdom of Peter, and Peter asked, 
What shall befall John? the only reply was, 
" What is that to thee ? Follow thou me." Nor 
was this loyalty to him a temporary condition of 
the little band, continuing only while the Master 
was living. On the contrary, he declared ex- 
plicitly before his death that he would continue 
to be with his disciples ; that he and his Father 
would come and dwell with them ; that the spirit 
that abode in him should abide with them also ; 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH 147 

that it should interpret to them the meaning of 
his teaching, and open to them new truths which 
they had not yet been able to receive; that it 
should impart to them power; and that under 
this impartation they should do greater works 
even than those which he had done. Near the 
close of his life he gave in a beautiful parable 
an illustration of this principle of spiritual unity 
in personal loyalty to him as a living Lord and 
Master. He was just about going out with 
his friends to a vineyard outside the city walls, 
or perhaps had already reached this coveted re- 
tirement. A vine was growing against the wall; 
the pruning knife had been at work and some 
dead branches lay upon the ground. Behold, he 
said, the symbol of your future life. I am the 
vine, and shall always be with you. Loyalty to 
me, fellowship with me, unity with me, is the 
one condition of our order and our organization. 
So long as this loyalty is maintained, you will 
bear fruit; whenever this loyalty is lost, when- 
ever for my will you substitute your own and 
for my life your independent and individual life, 
you will be like these branches, cut off from 
the vine and thrown upon the ground ; there will 
be no life in you. The first principle of his 
church, the sole secret of its unity, was to be 
personal loyalty to himself. 

2. The second great principle of his church 



148 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

was that of equality. This future organization 
was to be a brotherhood of equals. In it there 
were to be no ranks and orders for the exercise 
of authority. In the world without, he said, 
the great and strong dominate the rest. In your 
organization it shall not be so. You are to ac- 
knowledge no Master except myself ; all ye are 
brethren. Offices there may be, but they shall 
exist, not for honor and emulation, nor for the 
exercise of authority, but only for service. 
"He that is greatest among you shall be your 
servant." More than once the disciples engaged 
in hot discussion among themselves as to which 
should be greatest, and strove for precedence. 
It was after one of these questions that he ad- 
ministered that stinging rebuke, to which I have 
just referred, by himself washing the feet of the 
disciples who had been quarreling upon the 
question which should have the place of honor 
at the table. On another similar occasion he 
asked them what had been the subject of their 
contention, and getting no answer, took a child, 
and set him in the midst of them, and said, 
Except ye be converted and become as a little 
child, ye shall not enter into the kingdom 
of heaven. This fundamental principle, that 
every one in his church is responsible directly to 
God and under no authority except for purposes 
of service, he illustrated by a pregnant figure 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 149 

which has been singularly misinterpreted by one 
section of his church. In the East, a key is not 
unfrequently given to the steward of an estate 
as the symbol of his authority, much as a bunch 
of keys is sometimes given to the housekeeper 
in England, and by her worn, hanging from 
the waist. I give unto each one of you, he said, 
the keys of the kingdom of heaven. You are 
to have authority over yourselves. Whatsoever 
you prohibit shall be prohibited for you, and 
whatsoever you permit shall be permitted for 
you. For you are called unto liberty and self- 
control. 1 

3. The third principle of his church was that 
of liberty. In his kingdom no force should be 
used. Its only appeal should be to the con- 
science ; its only instrument, truth. In the very 
beginning of his ministry he was tempted to 
adopt world methods in order to win power, and 
he peremptorily refused. Later, the people in 
their enthusiasm would have crowned him King ; 
he refused the coronation and departed from 
them. He told his disciples that they were not 
to resist injustice by force. When he was about 
to be arrested, and one of the disciples would 

1 Observe that in this famous passage Christ does not say 
whomsoever, but whatsoever. Observe also that the kingdom 
of heaven is in the language of Christ a kingdom of God upon 
the earth. 



150 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

have resisted, he bade his impetuous friend put 
up his sword. When he stood before Pilate and 
was questioned, Art thou a king? he replied, I 
am, but a king whose only authority is the truth, 
and whose only followers are those who acknow- 
ledge supreme allegiance to the truth. And in 
telling his disciples how they were to act in the 
church towards those who refused to acknow- 
ledge its decisions, he said, Let such an one "be 
unto thee as an heathen man and a publican." 
That is, let him go his way, have nothing more 
to do with him. They were not to attempt to 
coerce him. He was to have his liberty; they 
were to have theirs. 

At the death of Jesus Christ, the disciples 
went forth to carry the new life which they had 
received from their Master, the life of faith and 
hope and love, into a world which was sensual, 
despairing, and cruelly selfish. At first, they 
made no attempt to form any ecclesiastical or- 
ganization. They had no conception how long 
and weary a time must elapse before the king- 
dom of God would arrive which they believed 
their Master had come to usher in. They fully 
expected his return during their lifetime. They 
conceived no need of any society which should 
outlast a single generation. The organizations 
which sprang up out of the apostolic preaching 
were spontaneous in their origin and different 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH 151 

from one another in their form and structure, 
though at first essentially the same in their 
spirit. The early disciples had no regular 
places of worship; they often met in private 
homes ; their societies were in their nature what 
they were sometimes called, households of faith. 
Occasionally an entire Jewish synagogue would 
accept the new faith. Then the organization 
remained unchanged, while the spirit which ani- 
mated it was revolutionized. Sometimes the 
brotherhood was composed chiefly of converted 
pagans ; then the organization naturally fell into 
the forms and methods with which the pagans 
were familiar. These households of faith, 
whether Jewish or pagan in their social origin, 
had no creed, no organized system of theology, 
no established liturgy. But they believed in a 
Messiah to whose second coming in their own 
generation they all joyfully looked forward; 
they used the Hebrew psalmody both for praise 
and for their responsive readings, as in the 
Jewish liturgies; they employed the Lord's 
Prayer, though in connection with extempora- 
neous prayer; they made the worship subordi- 
nate to instruction ; they gathered frequently, if 
not every week, about a supper -table, in com- 
memoration of their Lord's death and in joy- 
ful anticipation of his return ; this they followed 
sometimes with a church supper, partly as an 



152 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

occasion of social fellowship, partly as a means 
for providing the poor with food out of the re- 
sources of the more wealthy ; and they used bap- 
tism, generally, if not always, by immersion, 
as a rite of initiation into the new brotherhood, 
at first with the simple formula "In the name 
of the Lord Jesus Christ," — subsequently with 
the formula now generally in use, "In the name 
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." 
But the principles of which I have spoken were 
characteristic of all these primitive households. 
That is, the one condition of their unity was 
loyalty to the Master; and this loyalty to one 
Master carried with it the liberty of an abso- 
lute and an equal brotherhood. 

The Eoman empire was founded on principles 
directly antagonistic to those propounded by 
Jesus Christ. That empire was organized upon 
the principle of absolute subservient obedience 
to the emperor: his will was the source of all 
law; belief in him was the Roman's sole creed; 
reverence for him was the Roman's sole religion. 
To him altars were raised in every household; 
from him was derived the only authority which 
the Roman recognized. And this authority was 
exhibited and exercised through an elaborate 
bureaucracy. There was no brotherhood, and 
no semblance of brotherhood. Absolutism was 
filtered down through successive subalterns to 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 153 

the remotest province and to the minutest affairs 
of the great empire. And this authority, cen- 
tring in the emperor and expressed and exercised 
through ranks and orders of subordinates, was 
enforced by physical penalties. The ground of 
this authority was not in conscience, but in fear. 
Rome was a great armed camp — armed alike for 
the enforcement of imperial authority over its 
own citizens, and for the extension of that au- 
thority over countries which did not as yet recog- 
nize it. 

Thus at the beginning of the century stood 
these two kingdoms over against each other, 
with their diametrically antagonistic principles. 
The infant church of Christ : a brotherhood of 
absolute equals, centred in loyalty to an invisi- 
ble master, enforced only by the individual con- 
science. The giant empire of Rome: an armed 
camp, under the absolute authority of an en- 
throned Caesar, enforced by a standing army, 
extending throughout its entire territory, and 
secured through officials who were classified in 
ranks and orders according to the measure of 
their authority. The difference between these 
two empires is strikingly illustrated by their 
respective capitals. To the pagan, Rome was 
"The Eternal City; " the Christian looked for 
a new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from 
God. 



154 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

From the very first, these two organizations 
instinctively recognized in each other a mortal 
foe. The Roman empire was tolerant of all re- 
ligions except the Christian religion ; 1 that reli- 
gion Rome bent all its energies to destroy. The 
Christian church saw in Rome the incarnation of 
the world power, and John, the great prophet 
of the infant church, in a vision beheld the 
Christ going forth conquering and to conquer 
until the kingdoms of the world had become the 
kingdoms of the Lord and of his Christ. The 
history of the church down to the period of the 
Reformation is the history of the way in which 
Christian principles and the Christian spirit 
pervaded and transformed pagan institutions, 
and in which Christian institutions were moulded 
and pervaded by pagan principles. The result 
in the Middle Ages was an empire partially 
christianized, and a church partially paganized. 

Eulogy and condemnation of the church of the 
Middle Ages are alike easy; a discriminating 
judgment is always difficult. The admirers of 
the papal church — the most splendid, the most 
enduring, and historically the most powerful of 
all human organizations — have abundant mate- 
rial for their eulogies. They can point to a life 
so long that by the side of it the most ancient 

1 It never antagonized the Jewish religion until Christianity 
issued from Judaism. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 155 

Protestant sect is but a youth in its teens ; they 
can point to a missionary zeal so great that by 
the side of it the greatest missionary triumphs 
of our Protestant religion, if triumphs are to be 
measured by majorities, are insignificant. They 
can point to a self-sacrifice so deep, so abiding, 
so sacred, that the unbelieving world wonders 
and the believing world worships, — women de- 
nying themselves the sacred joys of wifely and 
maternal love ; men cutting themselves off from 
the possibility of a home, that they may serve 
the church, to them wife, mother, father, hus- 
band, God. There is no desert where the sol- 
diers of this church have not penetrated, there 
is no danger which has daunted them, no martyr- 
dom which they have not courted. They have 
planted the cross in the snows of Kamschatka, 
and in the burning deserts of Arabia; their mis- 
sionaries have penetrated without protection 
other than that of a sincere, enthusiastic, per- 
haps a fanatical faith, the wilds of China and of 
Africa, the cities of pagan India and the snow- 
covered forests of our own North America. 
Avarice and ambition have had no more devoted 
adherents than the Church of Eome has had. 
Seeking for the souls of the Indians, they dared 
every danger and suffered every privation that 
the boldest trapper dared or endured. Pesti- 
lence has not kept them from the hospital, nor 



156 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

the bullet from the battle-field. The Church of 
Rome has in her true sainthood enrolled the 
names of a hundred Howards and Florence 
Nightingales. 

We read this page in her history with admi- 
ration. It is written in letters of living light, 
of more than golden glory. We turn the page ; 
1 we find on the reverse side a history that fills us 
with alternate amazement and indignation — a 
history written in letters of blood and of fire. 
The cruelties of the Mohammedan Saladin pale 
beside those of the Christian Duke of Alva. 
Looking into the uncovered dungeons of the In- 
quisition, no wonder if we forget the patient, un- 
tiring self-devotion of the monks of St. Bernard. 
The festivities of cruelty that make us turn away 
from the pages of Waldensian history blot from 
our recollections the undying love of the Jesuit 
missionaries in North America. The solemn 
tolling of a bell breaks the silence of the mid- 
night, calling to more horrible sacrifices than 
ever Phoenician offered to his Moloch, or Druid 
to his God. Thirty thousand lives fall in the 
Massacre of St. Bartholomew, victims to the 
remorseless religious cruelty of this enigmatic 
church. For it is in very truth the unsolved 
enigma of history, — its flag red on one side 
with blood of martyrs w r hom it has slain, on the 
other side red with its own martyrs who have 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH 157 

died for it; bearing the uplifted sword in the 
one hand, and the uplifted cross in the other; 
distinguished alike by the names of Loyola and 
of Xavier, of Torquemada and of Bishop Fene- 
lon. Enigma as it is, yet he who recognizes 
that the church is itself an evolution, in which 
the religious life has struggled for existence and 
has survived only by proving its right to sur- 
vival, will find in the doctrine of evolution the 
explanation of this enigma. The glory of the 
Roman Catholic Church, the glory of self-sac- 
rifice, is the glory of Christianity; its shame of 
pride, sensuality, and cruelty is the shame of 
paganism. 

After Christ's death, as the Messiah's ex- 
pected return was delayed, and the church re- 
alized the necessity of a permanent work of 
preparation for his coming, it realized also the 
imperative necessity for a permanent organiza- 
tion of his church. They who met at first in 
private houses for prayer, praise, and mutual 
instruction very soon began to plan and push 
forward enterprises for imparting to others the 
life of faith and hope and love which they 
themselves possessed. The Jewish law had laid 
upon the church a duty of charity, and the 
spirit of Christ converted this duty into an 
enthusiasm. The forces first of Judaism and 
then of paganism were alert and aggressive to 



158 THE EVOLUTION OF CEB1ST1ANITY. 

destroy the infant church, and persecution com- 
pelled mutual cooperation for mutual protection. 
Thus missionary zeal, the enthusiasm of love, 
and the necessities of self - defense compelled 
organization. The early Christian societies were 
modeled after those of existing institutions. 
"With probably no single exception," says Pro- 
fessor Hatch, "the names of Christian institu- 
tions and Christian officers are shared by them 
in common with institutions and officers outside 
of Christianity." Each separate household of 
faith came to have a presiding officer, some- 
times called elder or presbyter, sometimes called 
overseer or bishop. Then two or more of these 
households of faith in any given town were 
united under one president. Then the house- 
holds of a province were similarly united under 
a president who himself presided over the work 
of the other local presidents ; and so gradually 
grew up a systematic and highly organized epis- 
copal system. 

By the fourth century the Christian church 
had become so strong that the sagacious Con- 
stantine thought it wiser and easier to use than 
to fight it. He discovered that "the Christian 
soldiers were stronger and braver than their fel- 
lows," and " man for man and battalion for bat- 
talion were more than a match for the pagans." 
By an imperial decree he made Christianity the 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 159 

religion of the state. But it was the fundamen- 
tal maxim of the Roman constitution that the 
care of religion was the right as well as the duty 
of the civil magistrate. Thus, the decree which 
made Christianity the religion of the state made 
Constantine the head of the church. Thus, the 
conversion of the empire was the perversion of 
the church. If the one was half Christianized, 
the other was at the same time and by the same 
act half paganized. Imperial Christianity was 
a mongrel religion. Its character is indicated 
by a single significant fact: the coin which Con- 
stantine issued bore the name of Christ on one 
side, and the figure of Apollo on the other. 

As the church waxed stronger and the empire 
grew weaker, the central and imperial authority 
was gradually transferred from the Emperor to 
the Bishop of Rome. It is needless here to trace 
the process of the transfer. It was effectually 
symbolized when, A. D. 800, Charlemagne knelt 
before the high altar of the stateliest temple of 
Christian Rome, and received from the hands of 
the Pope the diadem of the Caesars. From that 
day the Church of Rome has maintained with 
an obstinate consistency that it is the right of the 
Pope, as the Vicar of God, to give the crown to 
whom he will, and take it away when the king 
proves himself unworthy. True, the Popes have 
not always been successful in maintaining this 



/ 



160 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

authority. Sometimes the Emperor has been 
subject to the Pope, sometimes the Pope has 
been subject to the Emperor, and sometimes the 
two have shared the authority between them. 
But the claim to imperial authority asserted 
by Leo III. in the coronation of Charlemagne 
has never been formally withdrawn or disavowed 
by any successor, from that day to this. 

With this adoption of the imperialism of Rome 
by the church of Christ, there came necessarily 
the adoption of its bureaucratic method. It is 
impossible for the head of a paternal government 
to exercise his authority directly over all his sub- 
jects, as the father of a family may over his 
children. That authority must be entrusted to 
subordinates and transmitted through them. 
Thus grew up in the church of Rome a hierar- 
chy whose offices were analogous to those of the 
Roman empire, and whose very names, as we 
have seen, were borrowed from their pagan pro- 
totypes. Father, Rabbi, Master, whom Christ 
had said should not exist in his church, were all 
transferred with imperialism from pagan to papal 
Rome. And this transmutation of the Christian 
into the pagan organization was necessarily fol- 
lowed by the repudiation of Christ's principle 
that force was not to be employed in his church. 

In pagan thought the Christian idea of pun- 
ishment as remedial found absolutely no place. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 161 

The object of pagan punishment was either the 
gratification of a personal revenge, the exercise 
of what is called vindictive justice, or the de- 
terring of other criminals from the perpetration 
of similar crimes. With these three objects in 
view, the punishments were made as cruel as 
possible. This pagan conception of punishment 
has not even in our day been wholly eliminated, 
and we are only very gradually learning that 
mercy has more power than cruelty to deter. In 
the Middle Ages, the punishments inflicted by 
the state were pitiless. "The wheel, the caul- 
dron of boiling oil, burning alive, burying alive, 
flaying alive, tearing apart with wild horses, 
were the ordinary expedients by which the 
criminal jurist sought to deter crime by fright- 
ful examples which would make a profound im- 
pression on a not over-sensitive population." 1 
In England, theft was punished by burning; in 
France, by burying alive ; in Germany, murder 
and arson were punished by breaking on the 
wheel. In Denmark, blasphemers first had their 
tongues cut out and then were beheaded. In 
Hanover, the false coiner was punished by be- 
ing burned to death. When the church once 
adopted the principle that force might be used 
for the punishment of heresy, it was inevita- 

1 H. C. Lea's History of the Inquisition, vol. i. 234, from 
which also the other illustrations are taken. 



162 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ble that it should use the cruel punishments in 
vogue in its own age. Yet it adopted this 
principle only gradually and reluctantly. The 
first persecutions for religious opinion were in- 
troduced by Constantine, and against them bish- 
ops in the church vigorously protested. The 
first persecuting bishops were compelled to re- 
sign. Even as late as the eleventh century, per- 
secution of heretics by the church was compelled 
by the mob in spite of ineffectual resistance by 
the ecclesiastics. The truth that no opinion, 
however erroneous, can be a sin, is still unrecog- 
nized by the majority of the church. 1 It is not 
strange that in the Middle Ages such false opin- 
ions were regarded as crimes; and as injuries 
to the soul are greater than injuries to the body, 
and as apostasy from God is a greater sin than 
treason to the state, it is not strange that no 
punishment was deemed too severe for these, the 
greatest and the most pernicious crimes. 

Thus, by the fifteenth century the abandon- 
ment of Christ's principles seemed to be com- 
plete. The bond which united the church was 
not loyalty to Christ, but loyalty to the Bishop 
of Rome. The Christian brotherhood was 
abandoned, and for it was substituted an elabo- 

1 I assume, without discussion, that sin consists in the act of 
the will, and therefore that no purely intellectual act can be 
sinful, though it may grow out of sin or lead into sin. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 163 

rate ecclesiastical hierarchy. The principle that 
the only force to be used in the church is that 
of the individual conscience had given place to 
the use of the rack, the fagot, and the sword. 
The medal given by Gregory VII. to the 
Knights of St. John, having the cross on one 
side and the sword on the other, was a true sam- 
ple of the adoption by the church of the military 
methods of the pagan empire. The very word 
"spiritual" had lost its signification. Ecclesi- 
astics, if they were duly ordained ; buildings, if 
they were properly consecrated ; and even lands, 
if they belonged to the church, had become 
"spiritual." 

A beautiful legend of this epoch illustrates the 
change which had passed over the spirit of the 
church. According to this legend, Jesus Christ 
comes back upon the earth, and shows himself 
at a great auto dafe in Seville, where hundreds 
of heretics are burned in his honor. He walks 
about in the ashes of the martyrs. The common 
people throng about him, and he blesses them. 
The chief Inquisitor causes him to be arrested 
and at midnight visits him in his cell. "You 
are wrong," says the Inquisitor, "in coming 
again to the earth to interfere in the work of 
your church. You were wrong not to accept 
the offer of the Tempter, wrong to undertake to 
convert the world by silent and spiritual forces. 



164 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

There are but three forces on earth which can 
keep humanity in check, — the miracle, the mys- 
tery, and the authority. You have rejected 
them all, to proclaim a freedom and a love for 
which mankind are not ready. It has been 
necessary for the church to correct your work 
and supplement it with the sword of Caesar. 
You also, to-morrow, shall be burned, for you 
shall not be permitted to interfere with the 
work of your church." Christ answers not a 
word, looks into the eyes of the Inquisitor with 
mild, familiar gaze, then stoops and kisses the 
old man on his bloodless mouth. The old man 
trembles, opens the cell door, and bids the Mas- 
ter depart, never to return. Eloquently does 
the legend indicate the change which had come 
over the spirit of Christ's church since the days 
of Christ. 

And yet, if Christianity had been corrupted 
by paganism, paganism had been ameliorated by 
Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church was 
not exceptionally cruel ; it shared the cruelty of 
a cruel age. Really denying, it in form recog- 
nized Christ's fundamental principle, that force 
is not to be used in the maintenance of his king- 
dom. It did not itself punish heresy. It tried 
and condemned the heretic, and then turned him 
over to the civil authorities to be punished for 
the crime of which he was convicted. If the 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 165 

state refused to punish crime and maintain order 
and truth, the church absolved the citizens from 
their allegiance to the king on the ground that 
the king had failed of his solemn duty. If like 
Frederick II. of Germany, the king was an in- 
fidel, or like John of England, an apostate, the 
church claimed the right to dethrone him and 
put another and a loyal king in his place. But 
the punishments inflicted for heresy were in- 
flicted in the name of the state, to whose mercy 
the church in terms always commended the 
heretic. 

The Roman Catholic bureaucracy, unlike that 
of imperial Eome, was a democratic bureau- 
cracy. The humblest person might, and some- 
times did become Pope, and he earned that office 
by services rendered, not always indeed to hu- 
manity, but always to the church. The bro- 
therhood which Christ had sketched existed in 
fragmentary and modified forms in various mo- 
nastic orders. The Latin tongue was adopted as 
the language of the church under all skies and 
in all nations. The church, by preaching the 
unity of God, laid the foundation for a true 
unity of Christendom. The confederation of 
the churches throughout the Roman empire 
created a common life. Poverty in one section 
was felt as a common sorrow, and was alleviated 
by contributions from the churches far and near. 



166 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

The foundation of a public opinion was laid in 
a system of instruction, which, emanating from 
and ruled over by one head, was essentially 
one, and by a spiritual life which, though cor- 
rupted by gross superstitions, bound the church 
together. The Pope was without any consider- 
able army. His only force was this public opin- 
ion which the church had created and kept alive. 
It was before this public opinion that kings 
trembled and bowed. It was to this public 
opinion that finally the church itself was com- 
pelled to bow. 

Though the Bishop of Rome took the place of 
the Emperor of Rome, and though allegiance 
to him, not to the invisible Christ, became the 
bond of union of the church, still the emperor 
was not deified. He was not God, but the 
Vicar of God. Households raised no altars 
to his name; no church worshiped him; and 
when at St. Peter's the Host, symbol of Christ, 
was raised in air, Pope, cardinal, bishop, priest, 
altar boy, and peasant bowed together in rev- 
erence before it. 

The Reformation was primarily the protest 
of the Teutonic race against the imperialism of 
Rome. The doctrine that every man shall give 
account of himself to God was Luther's war- 
cry, and it became the central doctrine of Cal- 
vinism. The early Reformers did not see the 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 167 

full significance of this doctrine, but it neces- 
sarily carries with it the abolition of the use 
of force in the church. The last remnant of 
Roman militarism lingers in the ecclesiastical 
trials of our day, whose only penalty upon the 
offending clergyman is a new ecclesiastical affi- 
liation, with usually a larger congregation and 
a greater influence and prestige than before. 
Protestantism, abandoning the doctrine of force, 
abandoned also the Roman emperor as the cen- 
tre of the church, and loyalty to the Eoman 
emperor as its bond of union. But it did not 
make Jesus Christ, as a personal and living 
Master, its centre, nor has it been content to 
make simple loyalty to him the only condition 
of membership and the only bond of union. In 
lieu thereof it offers three substitutes. The Re- 
formed churches propose a creed; they recur 
from Roman imperialism to Greek philosophy ; 
the church, from being an army, becomes a 
school of philosophy. The Anglicans affirm an 
apostolical succession; they recur to Judaism; 
and propose, as the bond uniting their churches 
in an organism, a spiritualized survival of the 
Aaronic priesthood. Finally, the Independents 
abolish church unity altogether ; and for a plan- 
etary system substitute a universe of wandering 
comets. Thus in the Protestant church of to- 
day the use of force as a means of maintaining 



168 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

authority is abandoned, though there is not yet 
a frank recognition of the supreme authority 
of conscience ; and offices are coming to be 
places of service, not of authority, though the 
distinction between the two functions is not 
sharply drawn. But the problem of church 
unity remains still unsolved. The church of to- 
day is still a composite. In it, more than in 
any other organization, is the spirit of faith and 
hope and love manifested. Its life is the life of 
Christ, but its organization is still pagan, Jew- 
ish, or a composite of the two. The organi- 
zation of the church of Rome is a survival of 
Caesarism; that of Anglicanism is a survival 
of Judaism ; that of the Reformed or Presbyte- 
rian churches is a survival of Greek schools of 
philosophy; and that of the Independents or 
Congregationalists is a survival of Teutonic in- 
dividualism. 

What of the future? How shall the unsolved 
problem of church unity be solved? Not by 
going back to papal imperialism. There is, in- 
deed, no danger to American civilization in the 
papal church. The Inquisition will never be 
revived. It belonged not to the church, but to 
a barbarism which Christianity has already con- 
quered. But the papal church is neither our 
model nor our goal. It is a strange amalgam. 
Its bloodless sacrifice of the Mass, its Eternal 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH 169 

City, its Pope and priesthood, are relics of the 
sacrificial and hierarchical system of Judaism. 
Its mediatorial theology, its intercession of 
saints and angels, its adoration of images, and 
its absolutism in government are relics of Ro- 
man paganism. Its monasteries and convents 
are curious specimens of the arrested develop- 
ment of that brotherhood of man which has 
found in our later days larger, better, and more 
Christian expression. Its confessional for pri- 
vate counsel, its absolution, giving public and 
authoritative declaration of the forgiveness of 
sins, and its self-sacrificing spirit, shown in 
many a monk, missionary, and priest, all mani- 
fest, though in forms somewhat archaic, the 
spirit of the gospel, and furnish both inspira- 
tion and suggestion to those who deny the au- 
thority of the Church of Rome, and find no help 
to their spiritual life in its Jewish and Roman 
symbolism. Take it for all in all, the Christian 
evolutionist sees in the Church of Rome, not 
an antichrist, but a specimen of arrested Chris- 
tian development, the remedy for which is not 
war, but education, not theological polemics, but 
the schoolhouse. 

Nor will church unity be secured by accepting, 
as the final word of God's Providence, Presby- 
ter ianism. The creed is not the centre of the 
church, loyalty to the creed is not the bond of 



170 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

union. The intellect is divisive. Creeds are 
not intended to unite men, but to separate them. 
From the Nicene Creed down to the last creed of 
Congregationalism, there is not one which had 
not for its prime object the exclusion of certain 
classes of men from the organization which 
adopted the creed as its platform. The Nicene 
Creed was framed to exclude the Arians; the 
Decrees of the Council of Trent were framed to 
exclude Protestants; the Westminster Confes- 
sion of Faith was framed to exclude Arminians ; 
the Episcopal Thirty-nine Articles were framed 
to exclude Roman Catholics and Independents ; 
and the latest creed of Congregationalism was 
framed to exclude Unitarians and Universalists. 
The church which adopts a creed as its centre, 
and loyalty to a creed as its bond of union, is 
a school of philosophy. Its assumed function is 
to teach a system, not to proclaim a person. 

Nor does Episcopacy answer the unanswered 
problem of church unity. The bishops of the 
Episcopal Church propose four conditions of 
Christian union, the Bible, the Nicene Creed, 
the two sacraments, and the historic Episcopacy. 
The first two conditions are Protestant, a revival 
of Greek philosophy; the second two conditions 
are Roman and Jewish, a revival of a semi-im- 
perial hierarchy. But the church is a circle, 
not an ellipse; with one centre, not with two foci. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHUBCH. 171 

That centre is loyalty to Christ alone. It is 
not loyalty to a Book, though the book gives us 
information concerning the Christ ; it is not loy- 
alty to a creed, though the creed may admirably 
express the opinion of a noble age concerning the 
Christ; it is not loyalty to an organization or 
hierarchy, though that organization or hierarchy 
may be admirably adapted to do the work of the 
Christ; and it is not loyalty to ceremonials, few 
or many, though they may be splendid and use- 
ful symbols of the spiritual life. 

Nor are we to abandon the problem of church 
unity altogether, and substitute for the church 
of Christ an aggregation of individual and inde- 
pendent assemblies. If the papacy is a survival 
of Roman imperialism, Presbyterianism of Greek 
philosophical schools, and Episcopacy of a Ju- 
daic hierarchy, Independency is a survival of 
Teutonic individualism ; as essentially incongru- 
ous with the ideal toward which all churches 
should set their face as are either of its sister 
systems. The church of Christ, as Christ and 
the Apostles depicted it, is an organic thing, with 
a unity, an organic life, a historical continuity. 
When the Apostle declares that the church is 
the bride of the Lamb, it is not a Solomon's 
harem he has in mind. When he declares that 
the church is the body in which God taber- 
nacles, he is not thinking of a number of dis- 



172 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

jecta membra. The river of God is not meant 
to separate into multitudinous streams as it 
nears the sea, like the Nile at the Delta. We 
do not all come unto the unity of the faith and 
of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a per- 
fect man in Christ Jesus, by splitting up into 
warring sects with polemical creeds and pugilistic 
piety. The glory of God in his church is not 
best seen by breaking it up into bits, each with 
its own peculiar shape and peculiar color, tum- 
bled promiscuously together and showing a new 
pattern with every turn of the kaleidoscope. 
The church described in the New Testament is 
a tree, rooted and grounded in Christ ; a body, 
Christ the head; a household, Christ the father; 
a kingdom, Christ the king. The true church 
of Christ is one ; but the unity of the church lies 
in the future. We shall not come to it until 
we recognize that loyalty to Christ — the his- 
toric Christ, the risen and living Christ — is 
the sole condition of union, and in that union 
is absolute liberty of thought, of worship, and 
of action. Christ the only Pope, Christ the 
only creed, they who possess Christ's spirit the 
only apostolical succession ; and all who are in 
Christ one, because they are in him, and are 
doing his work. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 

The first century of the Christian era was 
morally the darkest in history. The apparent 
splendor of the Roman Empire did not conceal 
from even its own thinkers the corruption which 
foretold approaching dissolution. The moral 
influences of the past seemed to have spent 
themselves, and no new power of righteousness 
had arisen for Rome's redemption. Govern- 
ment was an absolute despotism. Society was 
divided into two classes — many paupers and 
a few rich. Public corruption was not a pub- 
lic disgrace. Gluttony and drunkenness were 
fine arts, and licentiousness and prostitution a 
religion. The laborers were slaves ; public edu- 
cation there was none ; marriage was a partner- 
ship dissoluble at the will of either partner. 
In Palestine, also, there was decay, though yet 
not so complete. Thanks to the system of pub- 
lic education which Moses had founded, there 
was a parochial school for the children of the 
peasantry in every village that had a synagogue ; 
thanks to the restrictions which Moses had put 



174 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

about slavery and polygamy, there were few or 
no slaves in Jewish households, and not a harem 
in all Palestine. And yet even in Palestine the 
church had fallen under the dominion of a cor- 
rupt and infidel priesthood, who were agnostics 
in their creed, though they were still ritualists 
in their practice. 

At this time there appeared a young man of 
thirty whose brief life and simple teaching were to 
reconstruct the social order. He never went be- 
yond the bounds of his own little province. He 
gathered a few hundred of the common peasan- 
try about him, and talked to them of truth, duty, 
love, God. He told them that the world was 
not orphaned ; that it had a Father in heaven 
who loved his children, cared for them, suffered 
with them. He told them that all men were 
brethren ; that distinctions between rich and 
poor, high and low, cultured and ignorant, be- 
tween Hebrew and Greek, between Jew and 
pagan, — differences of ritual, of creed, of condi- 
tion, of race, — were of small consequence ; that 
the only vital distinction was between righteous- 
ness and unrighteousness, truth and falsehood, 
virtue and vice, love and malice. He told them 
that life was for service ; that to be useful was 
to be great ; that to be self-denying was to be 
happy ; that sorrow rightly borne was a blessing, 
not a bane ; that the way to overcome evil 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 175 

was by love and patience, not by force. Moses 
had told the Jew to love his Jewish neighbor as 
himself ; Jesus told him that the apostate and 
heretical Samaritan was his neighbor. Moses 
had forbidden cruel and disproportionate pun- 
ishments ; only maim, he said, the one that 
maims ; kill only the one who has killed. Christ 
went further. Do not punish sin at all, he 
said; cure it. Love is better than justice; a 
penitentiary than a prison ; a reformatory than 
a jail. Eesist not evil ; do good to them that de- 
spitefully use you. Moses had told them that 
God was justice — too holy to clear the guilty ; 
Jesus told them that God was love — so holy 
that he would cure the guilty. He came as a 
physician to cure the sin-sick. Forgiveness of 
sin, deliverance from sin, was his mission. He 
told them that not ignorance, nor wretchedness, 
nor race, nor even sin separated the soul from 
God. The more the soul needed God, the 
readier was God to give the help of his com- 
panionship. 

He, however, made no attempt to reform the 
institutions of society. He declared that mar- 
riage was not a commercial partnership, but a 
divinely ordained and ordered life, and he con- 
demned free divorce ; but with this exception 
he uttered no explicit directions respecting civil 
or political institutions. As he prescribed no 



176 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ritual, creed, or ecclesiastical organization, so 
he framed no civic order. He uttered no coun- 
sels respecting forms of government, and one 
cannot deduce from his teaching whether he 
approved of monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, or 
democracy. He said nothing respecting slav- 
ery, the industrial organization which was then 
almost universally prevalent. He made no at- 
tempt to institute any system of public educa- 
tion or to improve the schools which in Palestine 
were connected with the Jewish synagogues. 
It has been said that Jesus Christ was the first 
socialist. This is certainly an incorrect, if not 
an absolutely erroneous statement. It would be 
more nearly correct to say that he was the first 
individualist. The socialist assumes that the 
prolific cause of misery in the world is bad social 
organization, and that the first duty of the phi- 
lanthropist is to reform social organizations. 
Christ assumed that the prolific cause of misery 
in the world is individual wrong doing, and he 
set himself to the work of curing the individual. 
He was not a reformer, he was a life-giver, and 
giving life he left it to form its own social as 
its own religious organizations. But he taught 
both implicitly and explicitly that the effect of 
the life which he gave would be to change radi- 
cally the social organizations of the world. His 
first preaching was as a herald proclaiming that 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 177 

the kingdom of God was at hand. His first 
great sermon, the only one which has been pre- 
served to us in anything like completeness, was 
an exposition of the principles which would un- 
derlie and the spirit which would pervade this 
kingdom. And the disciple who stood nearest 
to him, and understood him best, declared in 
the later years of his life, his faith in the social 
and civic character of Christianity by the as- 
sertion that the kingdoms of this world would 
become the kingdom of our Lord and of his 
Christ. 

In order to understand the nature of the life 
which Jesus Christ imparted, we must take into 
account the Jewish religion, upon which, as on 
a foundation, he based his own instructions. We 
must remember that Judaism and Christianity 
are the same religion, one in the bud, the other 
in the blossom. Faith in man is as characteris- 
tic of this religion as faith in God. According 
to its teaching, the whole human race descends 
from one pair and have one blood. The kin- 
ship which unites men in one great brotherhood 
is more fundamental and more enduring than 
that which unites them in separate tribes, na- 
tions, or races. Man, not a particular class or 
clan of men, is made in God's image. To man 
it is given to exercise dominion over all nature. 
Sin is a fault not natural, but distinctly and 



178 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

emphatically unnatural, contra-natural, against 
man's true, real nature. The theology of Ju- 
daism is based on the fundamental doctrine 
that man is of kin to God. The religious ap- 
peals of the prophets are to man's inherent 
and indestructible divine nature. The civic 
institutions of Judaism are based on the same 
fundamental assumption, — man's inherent ca- 
pability to solve the problems of his own destiny 
under the immediate guidance and direction of 
God. When the Jewish commonwealth was to 
be founded, the assent of the people was first 
secured. Not even God would assume to be 
their king until they had by popular suffrage ac- 
cepted him. 1 The officers of the commonwealth 
were similarly elected by popular, if not by uni- 
versal suffrage, and were responsible to the peo- 
ple who had elected them. The problems of the 
national life were discussed and determined by 
two representative bodies, a Great Congregation, 
answering to our House of Representatives, and 
a Council of Elders, answering to our Senate. 
Local self-government was provided for by the 
organization of the nation into twelve tribes, 
each with its separate territory. Government 
was divided into three great departments, the 
legislative, the executive, and the judicial ; a 
division which experience has since demonstrated 

1 Exodus xix. 3-8, 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 179 

to be essential to the continuance of freedom. 
The adjustment of penalty to transgression was 
not left to the discretion of judges, nor to that 
of an imperial despot, but was determined by- 
explicit and definite statutes. Neither landed 
gentry nor hereditary caste was allowed in this 
commonwealth. A priesthood was organized, 
but it was forbidden any share in the distribu- 
tion of the land, and was made dependent on 
the voluntary contributions of the people. Ag- 
riculture was encouraged, war was discouraged ; 
slavery and polygamy were hedged about with 
such restrictions that they both ceased to exist ; 
the education of the common people was pro- 
vided for, at first by itinerant prophets and 
Levites, later by parochial schools connected 
with the synagogues ; and when finally the re- 
public became a monarchy, the appointment of 
a king was permitted only as a concession to 
public prejudice. 1 

To a people thus prepared by a conception 
of human dignity unparalleled elsewhere among 
the nations of the earth, comes the Christ. His 
coming gives to all that believe in him a new 
sense of the value and the dignity of mankind. 
Whatever our estimate of Christ may be, the 

1 A fuller exposition of the practical principles of the 
Hebraic commonwealth will be found in my Jesus of Naza- 
reth, chap. ii. 



180 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

estimate of the Apostolic church is not doubt- 
ful. Matthew saw in him the Messiah, the Son 
of the Living God ; John beheld him the Word 
of God made flesh and tabernacling among us. 
Paul bowed the knee to him as one who, being 
in the form of God, beggared himself that he 
might be made in the form of a servant; the 
unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
believed him to be the creator of the world, the 
brightness of God's glory, and the express image 
of his person. Put what philosophical interpre- 
tation we may upon their expressions of primi- 
tive faith, we cannot doubt that those who ut- 
tered them saw in this coming of God into a 
human life a new glorification of humanity. 
The Roman, by deifying man had degraded the 
conception of God ; the Christian, by humaniz- 
ing God had glorified the conception of man. 
For God had chosen man to be his tabernacle, 
his dwelling place, his image, the medium for 
his manifestation of himself. 

Entering humanity, God entered into one 
of the humblest class. It was not priest or 
king, but peasant child, whom he chose for his 
indwelling. So entering life, he addressed him- 
self to the lowest and the outcast. He recog- 
nized a divinity in every man, and spake that 
he might evoke and inspire that divinity. Him- 
self a peasant in his youth, he gathered his im- 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 181 

mediate disciples from the peasant class. The 
nascent Christianity caught this spirit of its 
founder and entered the Roman Empire at the 
bottom. It passed by the rich and the noble, it 
gathered its recruits from the freedmen and the 
slaves. The message of the Christian religion 
to a people living in hopelessness was one of 
inspiration. You are, it said to them, the chil- 
dren of God ; you have before you an immortal 
destiny ; the world's deliverer, who is yet to be 
crowned Lord of lords and King of kings, is 
one of your own class, a peasant like yourself ; 
God has entered him that he may enter you, 
and in him has glorified the humblest and the 
lowest. Human hearts responded to this trum- 
pet-call of hope. Self-respect and with it mu- 
tual respect were aroused in the hearts of a 
class which had hitherto known only universal 
contempt. The history of the first four cen- 
turies of the Christian church is, politically 
speaking, the history of a great popular upris- 
ing, the cause of which was the awakening of a 
profound and inspiring religious life. When in 
the fourth century Constantine yielded and made 
Christianity the religion of the state, it was to a 
new-born democracy he yielded ; it was a new- 
born democracy he summoned to be his ally. 

In all subsequent history the power of the Ro- 
man church was the power of the common peo- 



182 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY, 

pie. The Popes, in the epoch when their domin- 
ion was least questioned, possessed no army of 
any consequence. They appealed to the people, 
and by their appeals to the people they ruled 
over kings. It was democracy which in the per- 
son of Leo III. crowned Charlemagne, and later 
in the person of Gregory VII. kept the Emperor 
of Germany shivering in a penitent's shirt, wait- 
ing permission to enter the pontiff's presence. 
The Reformation was a further uprising of a 
more enlightened and a more free-spirited peo- 
ple. It was Teuton versus Roman. Almost 
the sole power of Luther in his "battle with 
Rome was the power of a public opinion which 
Rome could neither suppress nor control. It 
was public opinion which enabled Henry VIII. 
to emancipate England from the political power 
of the Pope ; which checked Bloody Mary in her 
sanguinary course ; pushed on Queen Elizabeth 
to a larger and more radical reformation than 
she ever intended or desired ; dethroned and 
beheaded Charles I., and dethroned and exiled 
James II.; and has by successive revolutions, 
some of them peaceful and others warlike, com- 
pletely changed the character, while preserving 
the form, of the British Constitution. 

This public opinion created by Christianity, 
organized and solidified unconsciously by the 
Roman Catholic Church, inspired with a new 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 183 

spirit by the Teutonic incursion, and at once 
creating and re-created by Protestantism, laid 
here on this continent, in a Christian faith, the 
foundation of a new form of government. The 
Puritans in New England, the Dutch in New 
York, the Roman Catholics in Maryland, the 
Anglicans in Virginia, and the Huguenots in 
France, widely as they differed from one an- 
other in their denominational tenets, possessed 
a common faith in God as the All Father, and 
in man as his child. They derived from a com- 
mon source — the Jewish and the Christian 
Scriptures — that faith in the capacity of man 
without which free institutions are impossible. 

They thus prepared this country for that gov- 
ernment by public opinion which is the essence 
of a true democracy. Jefferson is reputed to 
have said that if he had to choose between a 
country with newspapers and without govern- 
ment, and a country with government and with- 
out newspapers, he would choose the former. 
To say that Americans have chosen the former 
would be to sacrifice truth to antithesis; but 
they have developed a life in which newspapers 
make and unmake governments. The news- 
paper is the voice of public opinion, and it is 
this fact which gives the press its power. The 
voice is sometimes coarse, sometimes immoral, 
oftener unmoral; but it faithfully repeats the 



184 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

sentiments of its constituency. The newspaper 
brings the community to a consciousness of its 
own inner life. Each separate journal reflects 
by its advertisements the trade, by its news 
columns the conduct, by its editorials the 
thoughts and feelings, of the world whose or- 
gan it is. And every newspaper is an organ 
of some constituency. Whenever it breaks away 
from its constituency and misrepresents its read- 
ers, it loses its power and prestige, as more than 
one instance in the history of American jour- 
nalism demonstrates. To thoughtful men the 
condition of American journalism is far from 
satisfactory ; the press of to-day is more enter- 
prising than educative ; and there seems to be 
even a decadence, moral and intellectual, since 
the days of Greeley, Eaymond, Bryant, and 
Bowles. But to the student of our national life 
the reason is plain. Our public schools have 
taught great masses of men to read who have not 
yet learned to think ; and our more widely cir- 
culated, not necessarily our more influential jour- 
nals, represent a reading, but not a thoughtful 
constituency. It is on the whole an advantage 
to have life photographed ; it is well that half 
the world should know how the other half lives ; 
and the evolutionist looks with hope for the day 
when a better education will correct the evils of 
an imperfect education, and the press will im- 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 185 

prove because the public whose voice it is has 
improved. 

Meanwhile we can hardly fail to see, whether 
the fact inspires satisfaction or regret, that the 
press is really more potent than legislatures. 
To vacate one of the more influential editorial 
chairs for a seat in Congress is a distinct descent 
from a position of larger to one of lesser influence. 
The press in reflecting helps also to shape pub- 
lic opinion, which in turn creates legislatures and 
coerces them to do its bidding. Our lawmakers 
no longer really govern, nor even discuss prob- 
lems of government ; they only embody in legal 
forms the decisions to which the community has 
come, by discussion in public assemblages and 
through the public press. Every interest has to- 
day its journal, and almost every interest its Con- 
gress. A Prison Congress outlines and demands 
prison reform ; a Banking Association formu- 
lates the principles of banking and currency to 
be incorporated in state and national legislation : 
a Lake Mohonk Conference shapes the course of 
the nation towards the Indians ; a Civil Service 
Eeform Association secures reform as fast as it 
is able to create a public opinion favorable to 
reform ; a Liquor Dealers Association demands 
less restraint, and various temperance and Chris- 
tian bodies demand more restraint, on the liquor 
traffic, and legislation oscillates between the two, 



186 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

almost exactly registering the state of public 
opinion in each local community. Thus for a gov- 
ernment of the one over the all (monarchy) and 
government of the few over the many (oligar- 
chy) has been substituted that self-government, 
through the power of a public opinion, which 
gives, not indeed always the best immediate gov- 
ernment, but always the freest, the most progres- 
sive, and the most hopeful for the future. It is 
needless to trace in further detail the progress 
of this development. Enough has been said in 
this rapid survey to show that Christianity is 
the source of that uprising in the individual 
without which the uprising of the mass would 
have been impossible. All good government is 
aristocratic, that is, the government of the best 
over the inferior. Various attempts have been 
made in the world's history to select the best 
class to rule over the inferior classes. Chris- 
tianity evokes the best in each individual to rule 
over his inferior self, and thus lays the founda- 
tion for self-government in the community by 
making possible self-government in the indi- 
vidual. 

If the reader believes this rapid survey of 
the political history of Europe to be correct, he 
will readily see that Christianity, in creating 
government by public opinion, has with it cre- 
ated great political and social changes. It is 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 187 

not possible within the limits of a single chapter 
to trace these changes in detail, nor is it neces- 
sary. It is sufficient to indicate very briefly 
some of the more important of them. He who 
is interested in tracing them out more fully will 
find the material in such works as Charles L. 
Brace's « Gestse Christi," Dr. K. S. Storrs' 
" Historical Evidences of Christianity," and 
Lecky's " History of Christian Morals. " 

I. Government has passed through one radi- 
cal change, but only to enter upon another 
which may possibly prove to be not less radical. 
The earliest government was that of the family ; 
and the earliest tribal and national governments 
were formed upon the pattern of the family. 
The king, as father of his nation, ruled over it. 
He was thought to be endowed with a super- 
natural grace and wisdom ; and his people were 
regarded as children, quite unable to care for 
themselves. Christianity has already proved to 
the German race, and is convincing the Latin 
races, that men are men, not children, and do 
not need a political father to take care of them. 
Under this tuition the first step is to take from 
the king his paternal authority, to organize the 
state upon the principle of the sovereignty of 
the people, and to reduce government to the 
minimum necessary in order to protect the com- 
munity from wrong-doing at the hands of other 



188 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

communities, and the individual in the commu- 
nity from wrong-doing at the hands of other 
individuals. 

But already men are beginning to question 
whether, if the individual can take care of him- 
self without paternal interference, the commu- 
nity cannot by common action take care of its 
common interests. Undoubtedly it requires a 
much higher degree of intellectual and moral 
development for fifty million people to cooper- 
ate in industrial partnership, than it does for 
any individual to act alone, or in cooperation 
with a few like-minded with himself. Socialism 
affirms that men possess this higher intellectual 
and moral capacity ; or if this is not yet their 
possession, that it is within their reach. Thus, 
under the influence of Christianity, with its 
optimistic faith in man, — a faith quite incredi- 
ble except as it is founded upon a faith in God 
the All-Father, — government is undergoing a 
transition through three successive stages, which 
may be expressed by the words, Paternalism, 
Individualism, Fraternalism. Even the ultra- 
socialist is not, what he is sometimes called, a 
paternalist. He is a fraternalist. His schemes 
are founded on his belief, not in the incapacity, 
but in the capacity of man. He does not pro- 
pose that a paternal government shall do for 
him, but that by communal action he shall do 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 189 

for himself. Bossism has been driven from the 
church ; is being driven from the state ; and 
the socialist hopes that it will be driven from 
the mine and the factory. What progress has 
been made in free commonwealths in this direc- 
tion is hardly realized by most men, so rapidly 
and yet so silently have the changes been 
wrought. It is less than a century since the 
question was seriously discussed whether letters 
could not be more advantageously carried by 
private enterprise than by government. Now, 
in England, the telegraph is a branch of the 
post-office ; in Switzerland all express business is 
conducted by the government ; in Australia all 
railroads are owned and operated by the govern- 
ment ; while city after city, both in this country 
and abroad, has initiated municipal industries, 
including governmental ownership and control 
of water supply, lighting, and transportation. 
I make no mention of the progress in this di- 
rection in Germany, where both banking and 
insurance have become distinctly governmental 
functions, since it may be a fair question 
whether in Germany these are the products of a 
paternal or a fraternal government. But on the 
other hand, the student of modern history should 
not overlook the fact that by far the greatest 
proportion of the educational work of this coun- 
try is carried on under the immediate direction 



190 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of the people themselves, and this in every 
grade from the kindergarten to the university, 
and even to the post-graduate and professional 
school. 

This movement toward fraternalism in gov- 
ernment is still in its experimental stage, and 
so far as the wisdom of these experiments de- 
pends on the question of the proper function of 
government, it is one about which Christianity 
has nothing to say. It may well be that as 
church and state are better separated, so are 
church and industry. It may well be that the 
organization which governs would better not be 
the organization which carries on great indus- 
trial enterprises, even those which are of a com- 
mon concern. It would be foreign to my pur- 
pose to enter upon that question here. It must 
suffice to say that the Christian evolutionist 
will, if he is consistent, base his objection to 
state control or even to state ownership of rail- 
roads, mines, telegraphs, banks, and other com- 
mon enterprises, on some other ground than the 
absolute and ineradicable incapacity of the com- 
mon people to control or even to conduct them. 1 

1 That I may not seem to my reader to come perilously 
near a debated question only skillfully to evade it, I may add 
that according" to my judgment industrial and political func- 
tions are different; that any movement for enlarging the 
functions of government in the direction of industrial enter- 
prises should be very cautious ; but that I believe — subject 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 191 

II. The relation of Christianity to science 
may not be at first very evident ; for the Bible 
contains no revelation of any scientific truths ; 
the indications are that its writers shared the 
scientific opinions of their age ; and if Christ 
himself knew better about the laws of nature 
than did his contemporaries, it is certain that he 
did nothing to enlighten them on that subject. 
No important additions to the scientific know- 
ledge of the race can, so far as I know, be at- 
tributed to the early Hebrew people. But the 
scientific development which characterizes this 
age would have been impossible had it not been 
for the inculcation of two moral principles by 
the Bible, to both of which I have already re- 
ferred. 

The first is the Biblical teaching that nature is 
subject to the dominion of men ; rather the pro- 
founder teaching that the physical is wholly sub- 
ject to the dominion of the spiritual. Nature is 
depersonified in the first chapter of Genesis, and 

to a change of mind as the result of actual experiment — that 
the people have the right to conduct any public industrial 
enterprises, the conduct of which is essential to their common 
well being, such as street lighting, transportation, water sup- 
ply, and the like, which upon actual experiment it appears 
they can conduct more economically and efficiently for them- 
selves, through public officials, than by entrusting them to 
private enterprise and paying " what the business will bear." 



192 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

never in the history of the Jews are there traces 
of that personification which is almost universal 
in other lands. We meet in Hebrew literature 
with no sprites, or nymphs, or fauns, or gnomes, 
or fairies, or Robin Goodfellows. God is im- 
manent in nature ; and man as the son of God 
shares God's mastery and dominion over nature. 
So long as men believed that the lightning was 
the thunderbolt of Jove, it was impossible that 
they should attempt to catch it and send it on 
their errands. The faith that all material things 
are subject to a spiritual lordship is essential to 
scientific exploration, much more to scientific 
dominion over nature. 

Nor are the teachings and spirit of Christianity 
less a prerequisite to all that phase of scientific 
development which has for its inspiration a sense 
of public welfare. A community which existed 
only for a small wealthy class could not have 
invented the press, the power loom, the photo- 
graph, the railroad, the steamboat, and the tele- 
graph. The secret of these great inventions has 
been the uprising of the people, and their de- 
mand for greater facilities and a larger life. 
Thus faith which sees the superiority of the in- 
visible to the visible, and love which seeks the 
greatest good of the greatest number, have been 
necessary partners in the scientific development 
of the race ; and that scientific development has 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 193 

been therefore not only confined to Christendom, 
but chiefly to those regions and those epochs in 
which Christian life and spirit have been most 
pervasive. 

III. It can hardly be necessary to point out 
the very apparent fact that popular education 
and Christianity have been both contempora- 
neous and geographically co-terminous ; for the 
schools of China cannot be said to furnish an 
education, since they do not teach their pupils 
to think. In the first century, as I have al- 
ready pointed out, the only system of popular 
education in the Roman Empire was that which 
was organized in connection with the Jewish 
synagogues, for the children of Jewish parents. 
Primitive as were the methods employed, we 
might learn something from them, for these 
schools furnished both religious and industrial 
education. As Christianity extended over Eu- 
rope, it created both a desire for knowledge and 
the schools to gratify that desire. Every mon- 
astery and convent had its library ; many of 
them their schools for the children of the town. 
That we have to-day any copies of the Bible, 
or of the Greek and Latin classics, is due to 
the monastic libraries and the monastic copy- 
ists. Modern agriculture dates from the ex- 
perimental schools of the Benedictine monks. 
The first seeds of the English revolution were 



194 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

sown by the democratic teaching of the Fran- 
ciscan friars in the towns and cities of England. 
When public education had gone so far that it 
became dangerous to the clergy, the clergy en- 
deavored to halt it. But the mind refuses to 
stop, let who will cry halt ! When ecclesiasti- 
cism began to educate men, not for their own 
sake, but for the sake of the church, democracy 
took the work of self-education into its own 
hands. The public school has taken the place 
of the parochial school. The questions that 
arise between the two are not those of method 
merely. The message of the parochial school 
is, Believe and obey. The message of the pub- 
lic school is, Inquire and act. The one aims to 
enforce authority, the other to give liberty ; the 
one to build up out of obedient children a great 
church, the other, out of independent thinkers, a 
free commonwealth. The school will not again 
nestle under the rafters of the monastery or 
the church ; but it should not dishonorably for- 
get its parentage because it has grown strong 
enough to live alone. 

IV. The change in criminal law wrought by 
Christianity is equally plain, and may be indi- 
cated in as few words. The punishments of 
paganism were at first acts of personal ven- 
geance. The next of kin was left to avenge the 
murder of his relations. Public offenses against 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 195 

the state were personal wrongs against the king, 
and in the punishments inflicted he embodied 
the vindictive justice of the state, when he did 
not gratify his own vindictive passions. How 
cruel were the punishments which were invented 
under the inspiration of such a philosophy we 
have already seen. Christianity declared that 
it was not the function of men to judge and pun- 
ish their fellow-men. Judge not, Christ said ; 
vindictive justice does not belong to man. My 
followers are to remit sin, not to avenge it. The 
Roman Catholic Church has accepted this mis- 
sion more fully than has the Protestant Church ; 
and in this fact consists one great element of 
her spiritual power. But, gradually, in the best 
penological system we are approximating Chris- 
tian philosophy. Our prisons are made peni- 
tentiaries ; our jails reformatories. The most 
advanced penologists have now nearly arrived 
at the conclusions announced as premises by 
Jesus Christ, eighteen centuries ago. The latest 
and best form of penal administration treats the 
criminal as it treats the lunatic, — imprisons 
him, not to inflict vengeance on him for a crime 
committed, but to cure him of the disposition 
to commit crime in the future ; organizes its 
punishments, its industries, its schools, with re- 
ference to creating a new habit of life and a new 
nature in the criminal; detains him in prison 



196 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

until the reform is accomplished ; and releases 
him as soon as satisfactory evidence is afforded 
that he has both the ability and the steadfast 
purpose to live henceforth by honorable indus- 
try. Thus redemption is substituted for ven- 
geance as the end of punishment. The signifi- 
cance of this revolution is hardly understood 
even by those who have been promoting it ; still 
less by the public, who desire only to inflict 
their vengeance on the criminal, or to get rid 
of him and forget him altogether. Space does 
not allow me to trace here the gradual process 
by which this evolution in criminal jurispru- 
dence has been wrought, and show how to the 
intervention of the church is due the early en- 
grafting of the principle of mercy on the sys- 
tem of so-called justice, — a principle which is 
radically changing the original stock. It must 
suffice to remind the reader that the ecclesias- 
tical system of penances and purgatory was the 
first organized method of punishment in human 
society of which the avowed end was not ven- 
geance but reformation ; that the right of sanc- 
tuary, the essential idea of which was derived 
from the old Levitical " cities of refuge," was 
the first attempt to alleviate the administration 
of a rude justice by the principle of mercy ; and 
that courts of equity were created to mitigate 
the severity of Roman law in order to make the 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 197 

results of jurisprudence accord with the demands 
of a partially christianized conscience. 

V. The same influence which gradually eman- 
cipated the state from the despotic control of an 
irresponsible despot gradually took the shackles 
off the limbs of the laborer. The Jewish reli- 
gion honored labor. One of its most ancient 
traditions represents the first man as placed in 
a garden to dress and to keep it. The patri- 
archs, fathers of the race, were men of peaceful 
industry, not warriors, except as self -protection 
necessitated war. The greatest king of Israel, 
David, and her two greatest prophets, Moses 
and Isaiah, were taken from agricultural pur- 
suits. The nation was bidden by its constitu- 
tion to depend on a volunteer militia, to allow 
no standing army. The Messiah whom the 
Christians proclaimed as the deliverer of the 
world was born as the son of a carpenter, and 
had himself worked at the bench. His imme- 
diate followers were peasants, who depended for 
their livelihood on the work of their own hands. 
This honor paid to toil was carried with Chris- 
tianity wherever it went. In the opinion of the 
Christian church, idleness was a disgrace, pov- 
erty was not. At the same time the doctrine of 
human brotherhood was not only preached by 
the apostles of the new movement, but enforced 
by the consideration that the time w r as short 



198 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

in which caste distinctions would be recognized. 
As the church grew in power, the one distinction 
between clergy and laity dwarfed all others. 
Thus while the slave was taught that he was a 
son of God, the master was taught to treat his 
slaves as a brother in the household of faith. 
Christianity and Roman slavery could not co- 
exist. At first, emancipation was of individ- 
uals, then of increasing numbers. " St. Melanie 
was said to have emancipated 8000 slaves ; St. 
Ovidius, a rich martyr of Gaul, 5000 ; Chronia- 
tious, the Roman prefect under Diocletian, 1400 ; 
Hermes, a prefect in the reign of Trajan, 1250. 
. . . Numerous charters and epitaphs still re- 
cord the gift of liberty to slaves throughout the 
Middle Ages, for the benefit of the soul of the 
donor or testator. ... In the twelfth century 
slaves were very rare. In the fourteenth cen- 
tury slavery was almost unknown." 1 Despite 
many assertions to the contrary, despite some 
ground for them in a practical apostasy from 
Christian principle within the church of Christ, 
it may be safely affirmed that emancipation in 
Great Britain and in this country would not 
have been possible but for the influence of Chris- 
tianity in awakening and strengthening those 
sentiments of humanity which finally proved too 
strong for the political and commercial influ- 

1 Lecky's History of European Morals, ii. 73-76. 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 199 

ences leagued together to perpetuate and extend 
the slave-power. 

The abolition of slavery is, however, but one 
step of that continuous and progressive change 
in the industrial condition of mankind which is 
due to Christianity. The end is not yet. That 
change is seen in four successive stages : first, 
slavery, in which the capitalist owns the laborer ; 
second, feudalism, in which the capitalist owns 
the land and has a lien upon the laborer, who is 
attached to the land ; third, individualism, in 
which the laborer is free to come and go where 
and as he will, and competition is relied upon 
to equalize and adjust property rights and the 
distribution of wealth ; fourth, the wages-system, 
under which a few men become the owners of 
all implements of industry, including the land, 
the great highways of commerce, and, under our 
patent laws, the great forces of nature, and the 
many use these implements of industry in pro- 
ductive toil for such wages as can be agreed 
upon by the two parties. This is not worse 
than slavery, as it is sometimes said to be, but 
infinitely better, — if for no other reason, be- 
cause the workingman is free. Nor will Ruskin 
and Carlyle be able to carry us back to the 
feudal system, with its pseudo-charity and its 
real oppression. Yet neither is it the finished 
kingdom of God. A system of industry under 



200 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY, 

which one man may acquire in a lifetime as 
much money as Adam could have laid by out of 
his earnings, if he had lived till our time and 
saved one hundred dollars each working day, is 
not a perfected system of human brotherhood. 
A system under which men and women have to 
work twelve or fourteen hours a day in order to 
earn bread enough to sustain life ; under which 
little children are set to work when they should 
be at school ; under which Eve, worn out by the 
burden of child-bearing, has also to bear Adam's 
burden of ill-remunerated toil ; under which 
God's universal gifts to his children, — fresh air, 
sunlight, pure water, and the soil, — are denied 
to hundreds of thousands, who are doomed to a 
life of drudgery in unsanitary conditions, and 
without hope of self -improvement, this is not the 
ideal brotherhood which the Master came to es- 
tablish upon the earth. Nor will that brother- 
hood be established until the democracy of 
political power, founded on a democracy of re- 
ligion and education, shall be accompanied by 
an industrial democracy ; until the tool workers 
have become also the tool owners, and class 
antagonisms are settled by the simple expedient 
of making the same class both capitalist and 
laborer; until labor of brain and hand counts 
for more than money in the world's market, and 
the present aphorism of political economy is 



EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 201 

revolutionized, and capital, not labor, money not 
men, is the commodity to be hired in the cheap- 
est market. 

If to any of my readers these seem revolu- 
tionary sentences, I can only remind them of 
the accusation brought against Paul and his 
associates, " They have turned the world upside 
down ; " and add my conviction that the accusa- 
tion was quite true. Christianity is turning the 
world upside down, and will not cease so to do 
until the world is right-side up. That all ser- 
vice is honorable and all idleness is a disgrace ; 
that to get money by whatever strategy without 
furnishing an equivalent is a dishonorable spoli- 
ation ; that wealth is a trust, and that men are 
to be measured, not by what they possess, but by 
what use they make of it ; that things are for 
men, not men for things, and that any civiliza- 
tion is wasteful which grinds up men and wo- 
men to make cheap goods ; that industry is not 
righteously organized until it is so organized 
that every honest and willing worker can find 
work, and find work so remunerative as to give 
him and his children an opportunity for self- 
development as well as for mere life — these are 
some of the axioms of the Christianity of Jesus 
Christ. 

The evolution of Christianity will not be com- 
plete until on these principles the social and 



202 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

industrial structure of modern society is built, 
and there is much for the reformer to do before 
this consummation is finally and fully accom- 
plished. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 

How does man come to a divine manhood? Is 
the process of redemption consistent with the doc- 
trine of evolution ? Can the doctrine of redemp- 
tion be stated in the terms of an evolutionary- 
philosophy ? Christlieb has said that the whole 
Christian creed can be stated in two words, sin 
and salvation. Are these two articles of our 
common Christian faith consistent with the doc- 
trine that all life, spiritual as well as physical, 
proceeds by a " continuous progressive change, 
according to certain laws, and by means of resi- 
dent forces "? If not, Christian faith and evo- 
lutionary philosophy are inconsistent, and we 
must conclude either that evolutionary philoso- 
phy is false ; that Christian faith is false ; or 
that spiritual life is not subject to the law of 
all other forms of life. For any belief which 
eliminates these two articles, sin and salvation, 
from the Christian creed destroys it altogether. 
It may leave us theists, but not Christians. 

The evolutionary philosophy is certainly not 
consistent with the popular statement of either 



204 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

sin or salvation. That statement is briefly this : 
God made man perfect. By an act of voluntary 
disobedience man fell. As a result of that fall, 
all his descendants became either depraved, i. e., 
inherently inclined to sin (the New School the- 
ory), or sinful, i. e., inherently guilty before 
God and deserving of his condemnation, inde- 
pendent of any voluntary conscious act com- 
mitted by the individual (the Old School the- 
ory). From this lost and ruined condition, 
produced by Adam's Fall, man is to be restored 
to that perfect condition in which he was origi- 
nally created. By this process of grace, either 
all men will be restored to Adamic perfection 
(Universalism) ; or a certain number of men 
specially selected for such restoration by God, 
the rest of whom he has been pleased to pass by 
(Calvinism) ; or a certain number self -selected, 
namely, all who choose to repent of their sin and 
accept Christ in this life (Arminianism) ; or in 
addition, those who, not having understood the 
terms of salvation in this life, receive and accept 
them in a life to come (the Doctrine of Future 
Probation) ; or finally, all those who, without 
ever having heard of divine grace, possess such 
character and disposition that they would have 
accepted the divine grace if they had known 
about it (Modern New England Theology). 
This restoration is, at least in its inception, an 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 205 

instantaneous act. It is in no sense a gradual 
change. The subject of it passes at once from 
darkness into the light, as one emerges at a 
given instant, in a swiftly moving train, from 
a tunnel into the sunshine, or wakes from a 
long sleep to find the room flooded with day- 
light. Formerly the soul was expected to know 
the month, day, hour, of the transition. If he 
did not, his conversion was looked upon with 
suspicion. Theologians still generally regard 
the change as instantaneous, though it is prac- 
tically conceded that in a majority of cases the 
time of the change cannot be definitely known. 
The soul creeps back into Eden and knows not 
when it has passed the cherubim with the flam- 
ing sword. The wilderness has become so blos- 
soming and joyful that the transition is not 
marked. But the commonly accepted theory re- 
mains the same : an original state of perfection ; 
a fall by a representative of the race ; a con- 
sequent universal condition of sinfulness ; and 
a restoration to that state from which the race 
fell. 1 

1 This view is not always, nor indeed generally, consistently 
held. A friend of mine a few years ago heard a sermon in a 
back country district, in which the preacher contended that 
Adam was made acquainted by direct revelation with all that 
modern discovery and invention has given to us, that his 
knowledge was passed down by tradition to his descendants, 
that it was gradually lost as a result of the Fall, that this 



206 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Now the doctrine of the Fall and of redemp- 
tion, as thus stated, is inconsistent with the 
doctrine of evolution. It is impossible to recon- 
cile the two. Evolution declares that all life 
begins at a lower stage and issues through a 
gradual development into a higher ; the theology- 
just described affirms that man was made at the 
highest stage and fell to the lower: evolution 
declares that life is a continuous and progressive 
change ; this theology, that spiritual life always 
begins in an instantaneous transformation : evo- 
lution, that each stage in the process of life is 
a step into a new life never before possessed ; 
this theology, that the end of all spiritual pro- 
gress is a return to a life once possessed, 
now lost. Evolution is quite consistent with 
theism, — with the doctrine that God made the 
world and rules over it, working out his pur- 
poses of love ; with the doctrine that the world 

traditional knowledge was the secret of the so-called " lost 
arts," and that the human race, through redemption, is gradu- 
ally recovering the intelligence as well as the moral and spir- 
itual perfection originally enjoyed by Adam and Eve. Few 
theologians, however, would now take so consistent a view as 
this ; the original doctrine of fall and salvation is generally 
combined in modern preaching with a doctrine of quasi evolu- 
tion both intellectual and moral ; the concession is made to 
the spirit of the age, that in many respects the modern Nine- 
teenth Century Anglo-Saxon is superior to our First Parents. 
I am not aware of any attempt to reconcile this modern view 
with the doctrine of the Fall in its original form. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 207 

is gradually growing better under the ministry 
of his gracious and loving presence. But to 
many it seems, as it once seemed to me, incon- 
sistent with the two cardinal doctrines of the 
Christian faith, — sin and salvation ; to deny 
the two most fundamental tenets of Christian 
revelation and of Christian experience ; to re- 
duce sin to a mere imperfection and immaturity ; 
and redemption to a mere process of growth and 
ripening. 

If I were still of the same opinion, I should 
not be a Christian evolutionist. For philosophy 
must take account of all the phenomena of 
life ; and a substantially universal consciousness 
testifies to the reality of sin and remorse. No 
philosophy can be true which ignores this testi- 
mony. I accept the evolutionary philosophy as 
an interpretation of the spiritual life, because I 
have come to believe that, rightly apprehended, 
it gives a more rational and self -consistent inter- 
pretation to the great facts of sin and redemp- 
tion than did the unevolutionary philosophy 
which accounted for sin by the Fall of our first 
parents, and made redemption consist of a re- 
storation to the condition which they had lost. 
The reader will pardon me if, in stating the 
grounds of my present convictions on this sub- 
ject, I state in an autobiographical form the pro- 
cess by which I was led to them. 



J 



208 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

When the evolutionary philosophy first began 
to be discussed in theological circles, the pro- 
gressive theologians put all their strength into a 
discussion of the relation of evolution to theism. 
They showed, and as it seemed to me showed 
conclusively, not only that the two were not in- 
consistent, but that evolution gave a grander 
view, both of creation and providence, than did 
the old philosophy, which made the one an in- 
stantaneous act and the other a constant inter- 
ference. But the real question, the relation of 
evolution to redemption, they did not discuss at 
all. 1 Jesus Christ came into the world to save 
sinners. If there were no sinners, only imma- 
ture men, how could there be either a salvation 
or a Saviour ? And clearly, sin and immaturity 
are not the same. The immaturity of a child is 
charming. Who would desire to see him a little 
old man ? But the willful wickedness of a child 
is not charming ; it is odious. Evolution, in de- 
nying, as it logically must, the doctrine of the 
fall of the race in Adam, seemed to me to deny 
the common sinfulness of the race, which I had 
been accustomed to trace back to Adam's Fall. 
Being accustomed all my life to gather my 
theology from the Bible, I went to the Bible to 

1 I desire to express my indebtedness for the first light I 
received on this subject to an address delivered by Dr. R. W. 
Raymond before the Congregational Club of New York city. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 209 

make a fresh investigation of this subject. In 
this investigation it was early made clear to me 
that the Bible lays no such stress upon the Fall 
as the ecclesiastical systems have done. There 
is an account of the Fall in the third chapter 
of Genesis ; but elsewhere in the Old Testa- 
ment, no direct reference to it. The law does 
not mention it; the Old Testament historians 
do not refer to it ; the poets and the prophets 
do not so much as allude to it. 1 In the New 
Testament the reticence is equally marked and y^ 
significant. Christ never mentions Adam's Fall. 
Neither does John, nor Jude, nor Peter. Neither 
Peter nor Paul refers to it in their reported 
sermons. Paul once gives an account of it in 
one of his Epistles ; but that in a parenthesis. 
The whole parenthesis might be taken out, and 
the argument would be unaffected, save by the 
loss of an incidental illustration. In two or 
three other passages he refers to it incidentally, 
as in the phrase, " As in Adam all die, even so 
in Christ shall all be made alive." But he never 
treats it as a fundamental and essential fact. 
In his opening chapter of the Epistle to the 

1 The only Old Testament references given to the Fall by 
the Westminster Confession of Faith, apart from Gen. iii., 
are Ecclesiastes vii. 29 ; Psalm li. 5 ; Job xiv. 4 ; xv. 14 ; 
Jeremiah xvii. 9. Some of these references indicate cer- 
tainly hereditary depravity, but no one of them, unless Eccle- 
siastes vii. 29, even remotely suggests a Fall. 



210 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Romans, where he brings his terrible indictment 
against Jew and Gentile, that he may show that 
all the world is guilty before God, though he 
gathers both from observation of life and the Old 
Testament material for this indictment, he makes 
no reference to any doctrine of a Fall. His only 
references to it are in arguments addressed to 
a people who already believed in it, and are 
made for the purpose of showing them that 
grace must be as universal as the race, because 
sin is as universal. This investigation made it 
first of all clear to me that, whether the doctrine 
of Adam's Fall were true or not, it occupied in 
the theology of the Bible no such place of prom- 
inence as it has occupied since in the scholastic 
systems of theology. 

Pursuing this inquiry further, I began to ask 
myself who wrote the account of the Fall in Gen- 
esis, and how in literature should this account 
be classified. The book in which this account is 
found is quite anonymous ; there is no word in it 
to indicate who is its author. An ancient tradi- 
tion attributes it to Moses ; modern scholarship 
to an unknown author many centuries subsequent 
to Moses. If we accept the ancient tradition 
and attribute the book to the most ancient date 
assigned to it by any scholar, and then accept 
the chronology given in the margins of our Eng- 
lish Bibles, the history was written twenty-five 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 211 

centuries after the fall of Adam occurred. 
How did the writer obtain his knowledge of 
the event ? He was not present, nor is there any 
reason to suppose that Adam or Eve wrote the 
narrative. It is not, then, the testimony of an 
eyewitness. Did God reveal the facts to the 
historian ? The historian makes no claim to 
have received any such revelation. Presump- 
tively he gathered his materials, as other his- 
torians gather theirs, from such sources as were 
accessible to him, — legends, myths, traditions. 
This presumption is strengthened by the fact 
that such materials are found in ancient legends 
of other nations and in the Chaldean tablets, 
whose age is at least as great as that of the 
Book of Genesis. It is further strengthened by 
a careful scrutiny of the Book of Genesis, which 
has enabled the scholars to separate it, hypothet- 
ically, into the narratives of which it was com- 
posed. It receives additional confirmation from 
the nature of the story of Eden, which, if found 
anywhere save in Hebrew literature, would at 
once be characterized by the reader as poetic 
and imaginative, not as scientific and historical. 
Finally, separating the Book of Genesis into its 
component parts, I found that in one of the nar- 
ratives of which it is composed, — the one con- 
taining the incomparable account of the crea- 
tion embodied in the first chapter of Genesis, 



212 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

— there was nowhere, directly or indirectly, 
any reference to an Eden or a Fall. It thus be- 
came very clear to me that the doctrine, " In 
Adam's Fall, we sinned all," which was the 
first item of theology taught me in my child- 
hood, is not the fundamental doctrine which I 
had once held it to be ; that, on the contrary, 
it furnishes a very unsubstantial foundation for 
the elaborate theological superstructure which 
has been reared upon it. It took me some years 
of study and reflection to reach this conclusion, 
and it will not be strange, if the reader, accus- 
tomed to think that the doctrine of the Fall is 
woven into the very structure of the Bible, be- 
cause he has found it woven into the very struc- 
ture of the creeds, is slow to accept at my hands 
this contrary conclusion ; but I must here as- 
sume it as established, and go on to a further 
investigation of the question what light philos- 
ophy and science throw upon the origin and 
nature of man, and upon the phenomena of sin 
and remorse, of pardon and peace. 

What, then, is man ? and what his origin and 
the law of his development ? 

Comparative physiology and anatomy make it 
clear that he is an animal ; sub-kingdom, verte- 
brate ; class, mammal ; order, apes. Whatever 
the historic origin of the race, embryology makes 
it clear that the origin of each individual of the 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 213 

race is animal, and that he passes in the earlier 
stage of his existence through processes of devel- 
opment analogous to, if not precisely the same 
as, those through which other animals of the 
same general class and order pass. Comparative 
philology and scientific anthropology, so far as 
we can trace animal life back to prehistoric peri- 
ods, lead towards the conclusion that all races of 
men not only have a common origin, but one in 
common with other kindred animals. Finally this 
conclusion is confirmed by the general results 
of investigation in other departments of life, — 
material, animal, social, political, historical, — 
which have led substantially all scientific stu- 
dents to the conclusion that all life proceeds by 
a " continuous progressive change, according to 
certain laws, and by means of resident forces." 

The objections to the theory that man himself 
has been developed in accordance with this law 
from a lower animal order are four, — the senti- 
mental, the scientific, the Biblical, and the re- 
ligious. 

The sentimental is expressed by the now fa- 
miliar joke : So, you think your grandfather 
was an ape? But to have ascended from an 
ape is not more ignominious than to have as- 
cended from a clay man. Whether God has 
put a divine spirit into the animal man is a 
question of fundamental religious significance, 



214 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

and we will consider it presently : but how he 
prepared this animal habitation for the indwell- 
ing of the divine spirit, whether by an instanta- 
neous creative act or by a gradual evolutionary 
process, is a question with no religious signifi- 
cance whatever. It is to be determined wholly 
by scientific considerations. 

The scientific objection is that there are gaps 
both in historical and in physiological continu- 
ity ; that, on the one hand, the famous " miss- 
ing link " between primitive man and the ape 
has never l>een found by geological research ; 
and, on the other, that to-day the difference be- 
tween the brain capacity of man and that of the 
ape constitutes a gap which the evolutionary 
hypothesis is nnable to bridge, — a difference 
freely and frankly admitted by the greatest 
exponents of evolution. 1 It is not necessary 

1 Thus Darwin, in The Descent of Man : ' ' We have seen in 
the last chapter that man bears in his bodily structure clear 
traces of his descent from some lower form ; but it may be 
urged that, as man differs so greatly in his mental power from 
all other animals, there must be some error in this conclusion. 
No doubt the difference in this respect is enormous, even if we 
compare the mind of one of the lowest savages, who has no 
words to express any number higher than four, and who uses 
no abstract terms for the commonest objects or affections, 
with that of the most highly organized ape. The difference 
would, no doubt, still remain immense, even if one of the 
higher apes had been improved or civilized as much as a dog 
has been in comparison with its parent-form, the wolf or 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 215 

for me here to reproduce the scientific answer 
to this objection, for this is not a scientific trea- 
tise. It must suffice to say that he who is not 
a scientific expert must be content to await 
the final judgment of those who are experts on 
this subject, and meanwhile accept tentatively 
their conclusion; and that conclusion, arrived 
at with substantial unanimity by all who have 
investigated this subject, is that the scientific 
objections to the doctrine of the evolution of 
man from a lower animal order are insignificant 
in comparison with the evidence in support of 
that hypothesis and the objections to any other. 
Thus Le Conte, himself a Christian believer, de- 
clares that " evolution, therefore, is no longer 
a school of thought. The words evolutionism 
and evolutionist ought not any longer to be 

jackal. The Fuegians rank among the lowest barbarians; 
but I was continually struck with surprise how closely the 
three natives on board H. M. S. Beagle, who had lived 
some years in England, and could talk a little English, resem- 
bled us in disposition, and in most of our mental faculties." 
(Vol. i. 133.) Similarly Huxley, in Evidences as to Man's Place 
in Nature : a It must not be overlooked, however, that there 
is a very striking difference in absolute mass and weight be- 
tween the lowest human brain and that of the highest ape — 
a difference which is all the more remarkable when we recol- 
lect that a full grown Gorilla is probably pretty nearly twice 
as heavy as a Bosjes man, or as many an European woman. 
It may be doubted whether a healthy human adult brain ever 
weighed less than thirty one or two ounces, or that the heavi- 
est Gorilla brain has exceeded twenty ounces " (p. 231). 



216 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

used, any more than gravitationism and gravi- 
tationist ; for the law of evolution is as certain 
as the law of gravitation. Nay, it is far more 
certain." In view of such a statement from 
such a source, it is decorous for the non-expert 
in science to pass by without discussion the sci- 
entific objection to the doctrine. 

The Biblical objection I have already consid- 
ered ; the religious or spiritual objection de- 
serves some further consideration. This objec- 
tion is, in brief, that evolution degrades and 
dishonors man ; denies the divinity in him ; 
despoils him alike of his divine parentage, his 
present hopes and expectations, and his immortal 
future ; reduces him from a child of God to a 
child of the beast. If this were true, it would 
be conclusive. For consciousness is the final 
factor in the determination of every problem ; 
and no scientific hypothesis could be true which 
set itself against the testimony of consciousness 
bearing witness to every man that there is in 
him a divine personality and an illimitable 
d.estiny. 

Man is an animal; but he is more than an 
animal. To say of a man, " He is a perfect 
brute," is not to pay him the highest possible 
compliment. Nor is the difference between him 
and the highest animals one of physical pecu- 
liarities merely. A two-handed ape would not 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 217 

be a man, nor a four-footed man an ape. Each 
would be simply a freak of nature. Nor is it 
that one possesses only instinct, and the other 
reason. Philosophy has long since abandoned 
the endeavor to maintain that sharp distinction 
between reason and instinct which was assumed 
by the older philosophies. Observation has 
noted many illustrations of reasoning power, of 
a limited degree, in the higher animals. 1 

But one looks in vain in the animal race for 
those moral and spiritual elements which are 
characteristic of men. The conscience of the 
dog is caught from his master, and he can with 
equal facility be taught that it is a virtue or a 
vice to steal. Eeverence for invisible qualities 
or for an invisible power is rarely, if ever, want- 
ing in even the lowest types of manhood, and 

1 The books are full of well-authenticated instances of 
reasoning in dogs, horses, and elephants. One, if I remember 
aright, told by Philip Gilbert Hamerton, may serve as a type. 
A spaniel, who had been taught that he must not go upon the 
garden beds, was observed attempting to drive a hen and 
chickens from the garden. They ran among the beds, while 
he ran round the beds, from path to path, in a vainly wild at- 
tempt to expel them. Suddenly he was seen to drop down, in 
the path with his nose between his paws, as if in meditation ; 
then to spring suddenly again to his feet, make a dart, catch 
one of the chickens in his mouth and start for the garden gate. 
The mother ran clucking after him, the brood followed her. 
Once outside the gate he dropped the chicken unharmed, and 
trotted up to the house, wagging his tail. If this was not rea- 
son, what was it ? 



218 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

never discoverable in the highest type of the 
animals. Worship of some sort is substantially 
universal with mankind, and unknown except 
among mankind. The ants have their slaves, 
the bees their warehouses, the beavers their col- 
onies •; but nowhere sign of temple, priesthood, 
or worship. In men alone is there the possi- 
bility of illimitable development. The end of 
education in the best trained animal is soon 
reached. Every new acquirement of man adds 
to his moral and intellectual power and in- 
creases his moral intelligence. He carries in 
himself the evidence that he is of kin to the 
Infinite, because he never reaches enduring sat- 
isfaction in what he has secured, but ever finds 
therein a new incentive to seek something yet 
to come. Thus the animal is, while man never 
is, but always is becoming. Whence did he 
receive this divine, this immortal, this undying, 
this illimitable life ? Is the author of the first 
chapter of Genesis correct ? Did God at some 
moment in man's upward career, by an instan- 
taneous act, breathe the breath of a divine life 
into man ? Or are we to accept the theory of 
the radical evolutionists, as interpreted by Le 
Conte and Darwin, and believe that this higher 
nature of man was developed out of the lower 
animal instincts, as the body of men out of an 
earlier and inferior form? This latter hypo- 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 219 

thesis must be regarded as yet among the un- 
proved hypotheses of science ; with more at 
present, it seems to me, against than for it. 
But the question is one of science, not of reli- 
gion, and we may well leave it for science to 
determine. Religion has to do with the present 
and the future, not with the past, — save as it 
disentangles us from the past for the future. 
It knows but three words, Duty, Destiny, God. 
Religion may well leave science to determine 
the question where man came from, and devote 
itself to the question what man is and what he 
can become. The candid reader, desirous only 
of the truth, will gladly recognize that the most 
skeptical of evolutionists affirms the existence 
in man of moral and spiritual qualities which 
differentiate him from the animal, and agrees 
with the orthodox believer that man possesses a 
divine nature and a divine destiny. 

Says Mr. Huxley : "I have endeavored to 
show that no absolute structural line of demarca- 
tion, wider than that between the animals which 
immediately succeed us in the scale, can be 
drawn between the animal world and ourselves ; 
and I may add the expression of my belief that 
the attempt to draw a physical distinction is 
equally futile, and that even the highest facul- 
ties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate 
in lower forms of life. At the same time, no 



220 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

one is more strongly convinced than I am of the 
vastness of the gulf between civilized man and 
the brutes ; or is more certain that, whether 
from them or not, he is assuredly not of them. 
No one is less disposed to think lightly of the 
present dignity, or despairingly of the future 
hopes, of the only consciously intelligent deni- 
zen of this world. We are indeed told by those 
who assume authority in these matters that the 
two sets of opinions are incompatible, and that 
the belief in the unity of origin of man and 
brutes involves the brutalization and degrada- 
tion of the former. But is this really so? 
Could not a sensible child confute, by obvious 
arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would 
force this conclusion upon us ? Is it indeed 
true that the poet, or the philosopher, or the 
artist, whose genius is the glory of his age, is 
degraded from his high estate by the undoubted 
historical probability, not to say certainty, that 
he is the direct descendant of some naked and 
bestial savage, whose intelligence was just suffi- 
cient to make him a little more cunning than 
the fox, and by so much more dangerous than 
the tiger ? Or is he bound to howl and grovel 
on all fours because of the wholly unquestion- 
able fact that he was once an egg^ which no or- 
dinary power of discrimination could distinguish 
from that of a dog ? Or is the philanthropist 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 221 

or the saint to give up his endeavors to lead a 
noble life because the simplest study of man's 
nature reveals, at its foundations, all the selfish 
passions and fierce appetites of the merest qua- 
druped ? Is mother-love vile, because a hen 
shows it ; or fidelity base, because dogs possess 
it ? . . . Our reverence for the nobility of man- 
hood will not be lessened by the knowledge that 
man is in substance and in structure one with 
the brutes ; for he alone possesses the marvel- 
ous endowment of intelligible and rational 
speech, whereby, in the secular period of his ex- 
istence, he has slowly accumulated and organized 
the experience which is almost wholly lost with 
the cessation of every individual life in other 
animals ; so that now he stands raised upon it, 
as on a mountain-top, far above the level of 
his humble fellows, and transfigured from his 
grosser nature by reflecting here and there a 
ray from the infinite source of truth." 1 

I conclude, then, that the doctrine that man is 
developed from a lower animal order is not in- 
consistent with the teaching of the Bible, if the 
Bible be interpreted as itself the history of the 
development of religious thought and life, the 
life of God in the soul of man, as I have en- 
deavored to interpret it in the second chapter of 
this volume ; nor is it inconsistent with the spir- 
1 Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, page 234. 



222 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

itual consciousness of man, — his consciousness 
of a divine life which makes him more than an 
animal and links him to God. 

Nor does it militate against the doctrine of 
redemption. On the contrary, it gives a nobler 
and grander conception of redemption than was 
ever afforded by the doctrine of Adam's fall. 
For the evolutionist sees in redemption, not a 
mere restoration of man to a former state of in- 
nocence, but a process of divine development 
which, beginning with man just emerging from 
the animal condition, carries him forward, from 
innocence, through temptation, fall, and sin, into 
virtue and holiness. To make this clear, I ask 
the reader, laying aside doubtful questionings 
as to the prehistoric history and development of 
the race, to trace with me in the rest of this 
chapter the actual progress of a soul, as we see 
it in life, from the cradle to a truly heroic and 
saintly manhood. 

The babe is innocent. No theology can make 
the mother really believe that the soul which 
looks trustingly up to her through those eloquent 
eyes is guilty, " under the wrath and condem- 
nation of God." But the innocence of the babe 
is the innocence of ignorance. It is guiltless of 
wrong-doing because it does not know the differ- 
ence between right and wrong ; innocent, but 
lawless ; not yet brought under law. It is a 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 223 

little animal. It knows only how to suckle and 
to cry. It is without power of self-control by 
intelligent consciousness and will, because intel- 
ligent consciousness and will are not yet evoked. 
It is greedy, has no control of its appetite, 
clamors and cries for its mother's breast, does 
not sip daintily and delicately, but drinks greed- 
ily, like every other animal. It is predatory, 
by nature a robber, but as innocent in its rob- 
bery as the magpie. It sees another baby on 
the floor, enjoying a rattle, crawls across, assails 
the possessor of the wealth, seizes it, and has no 
consciousness of wrong-doing. As it has to learn 
how to use eyes and hands and feet, so it has to 
learn how to use reason, consciousness, reverence, 
love. Little by little it learns that it is in a 
world of law. Fire teaches it that some things 
cannot be touched with safety; sour or bitter 
tastes, that all things cannot be put into the 
mouth with comfort. If the mother be wise, the 
child early begins to learn, by mother's prohibi- 
tions enforced by mother's penalties, that there 
are also moral laws. It begins to eat the fruit 
of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Con- 
science is awakened ; and conscience begins to 
legislate and to enforce its legislation. Thus by 
law comes a knowledge of sin. As the life en- 
larges, the experience of law increases. Brothers 
and sisters enforce unwritten law. The child 



224 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

goes to school. The laws of the school-fellows 
are more numerous and more exacting than the 
laws of the school-master. Business life creates 
new relations, and discovers new laws of busi- 
ness honor. Citizenship reveals still another 
code, or, to speak more accurately, other appli- 
cations of the one law of love. Marriage in- 
troduces the young man to another life, with 
obligations of chivalry, husband-love and father- 
love, protection of the weak and the defenseless. 
Thus each new development of life brings with 
it a new revelation of duty. In each stage of 
life the growing man comes to a new Mt. Sinai. 
And with the growing consciousness of law, en- 
forced by penalties, — paternal, governmental, 
social, or self-inflicted, — comes an ever-growing 
sense of right and wrong ; an ever-growing con- 
sciousness of the praiseworthiness of right con- 
duct and the blameworthiness of wrong conduct. 
The little animal is growing up into manhood ; 
and the process of this growth is a process in 
which, by successive stages, it is brought into the 
consciousness of a moral law, and so into the 
consciousness of a higher than a mere animal 
nature. 

This process of growth by law, enforced by 
penalties which are inflicted by authority with- 
out or consciousness within, is essential to moral 
character. And essential to this process of 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 225 

growth is temptation, that is, the conflict be- 
tween the higher and the lower nature. Only 
through temptation comes virtue, that is, the 
subjection of the lower to the higher nature ; 
and incidental to temptation is sin, that is, the 
subjection of the higher nature to the lower. 
Without this growth of moral consciousness 
— this emergence from the innocence of the 
mere animal — neither sin nor virtue is possible. 
Gluttony is not sin in a hog ; the greater glut- 
ton, the better the breed. Combativeness is not 
sin in a bull-dog ; the bitterer fighter, the bet- 
ter the dog. To heap up wealth for another 
to enjoy after they are dead is not sin in the 
bees; the more they gather and the less they 
give, the more valuable the hive. To spend life 
in the mere pleasure of song and sunshine is 
not sin in the bird ; the more careless the song- 
ster, the sweeter is his companionship. But to 
man there is a higher life possible than to feed 
with the hog, fight with the dog, gather with the 
bee, or sing with the birds ; it is as he comes to 
a knowledge of this higher nature that he comes 
to a knowledge of good and evil ; it is as the 
higher nature becomes victor over the lower that 
he comes to a life of true virtue. 

It is conceivable that man might go on this 
pilgrimage upward and onward from the animal 
to the intellectual and moral life without a lapse, 



226 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

that is, without that degeneration which, as we 
have seen, 1 the scientists recognize as inciden- 
tal to evolution. But in fact man never thus 
progresses. He deliberately, and again and 
again, turns his back upon the higher life, and 
goes down into the lower life from which he 
has emerged. The self-indulgent appetite, the 
unregulated passion, the blind and uninspired 
acquisitiveness, the surrender to selfish pleasure- 
seeking, is a recurrence to the animal nature 
from which the voice of reason, of conscience, 
of reverence, — that is, of God, — has sum- 
moned him. To call this recurrence to the 
animal nature, this degeneration from the spir- 
itual to the sensual, a " step in advance " is to 
confound the obstacles to progress with the 
progress which they hinder and delay. In every 
such lapse there is a true fall ; and we so recog- 
nize it in the common language of our daily life. 
If a theretofore honest and honorable man, 
yielding to some great temptation, has embez- 
zled or defaulted, we speak of him as having 
fallen ; and a " fallen woman " is the common 
designation of one whose lapse has been sudden 
from a position of the highest purity to one of 
sensual degradation. Whether Adam fell six 
thousand years ago, by eating the fruit of a for- 
bidden tree, is a debatable question, on which 

1 See chap. i. p. 10. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 227 

really little depends. Every man falls when, by 
yielding to the enticements of his lower, animal 
nature, he descends from his vantage-ground of 
moral consciousness to the earthiness out of 
which he had begun to emerge. 

Thus, in the view of the Christian evolution- 
ist, sin is not mere unripeness and immaturity 
which growth and sunshine will cure. It is a 
deliberate disobedience of the divine law, into 
the knowledge of which the soul has come in its 
emergence from the animal condition. 

And fall is not an historic act of disobedience 
by the parents of our race in some prehistoric 
age, through which a sinful nature has descended 
or been imparted to all their descendants. It 
is the conscious and deliberate descent of the 
individual soul from the vantage ground of a 
higher life to the life of the animal from which 
he had been uplifted. 

And redemption is not the restoration of the 
race to that state of innocence from which it 
has departed ; it is the entire process of intel- 
lectual and spiritual development in which man 
passes, by means of law and temptation, through 
the possibility of sin and fall, from the condi- 
tion of innocence, that is, of ignorance of law 
and therefore exemption from guilt, into the 
condition of virtue, that is, into a conscious 
recognition of law, and the subjugation of the 



228 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

animal self to the higher nature which law and 
temptation have evoked. 1 Something more re- 
mains to be said in the next chapter of this 
process of redemption from the point of view 
of the Christian evolutionist. 

1 It may be observed, incidentally, that this statement 
affords an interpretation of such declarations concerning Christ 
as that he " was in all points tempted like as we are, yet with- 
out sin," that he, as the captain of our salvation, was made 
" perfect through suffering," and that he " increased in wisdom 
and stature and in favor with God and man." These and 
kindred declarations indicate that he passed from the inno- 
cence of infancy to the virtue of manhood, through the path- 
way of law and temptation, exactly as all other men ; with 
this one radical difference, that as far as he came to a know- 
ledge of righteousness he fulfilled righteousness ; he never 
disobeyed, and so never lapsed or fell. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 

Virtue, the conscious recognition of a moral 
law and the conscious and deliberate conformity 
to it, is not the consummation of character. 
There is something still higher. The law of the 
spiritual life is not truly the law of the soul 
until wrought into the nature itself. Then vir- 
tue becomes the second nature. The man no 
longer by deliberate acts of the will conforms 
to a standard external to himself ; he is not 
subject to law, but is himself an embodied law ; 
becomes a law unto himself ; does whatever he 
pleases because he pleases to do whatever is 
right. Thus, in that spiritual evolution which 
constitutes redemption, man passes through three 
stages : in the first he is lawless but innocent, 
and in his ignorance of the law he is controlled 
by his animal impulses ; 1 in the second stage he 
recognizes the higher law of his nascent divine 
nature, and endeavors to conform his life and 

1 He is by nature the child of wrath (Ephes. ii. 3), not 
of God's wrath, but of his own unregulated appetites and 
passions. 



230 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

character to it ; in the third stage this law has 
become the law of his being, and he lives in 
peace and liberty, because his impulses have 
themselves become spiritual impulses. The first 
stage is innocence ; the second is virtue ; the 
third is holiness. 

What is the secret power by which this revo- 
lution, or, if the reader prefers, this evolution, 
in character is wrought ? The process is growth ; 
but what is the power ? 

Life gives to this question a very plain an- 
swer. The power which effects transformations 
in character is the power of another personality. 
This is the power recognized in all systems of 
education : the power of the teacher, inciting, 
inspiring, moulding the pupil. This is the 
power of the true orator, who moves his audi- 
ence less by what he says, or the method of his 
saying it, than by what he is. His speech is 
only the expression of himself ; and it is not the 
expression, nor the thought expressed, but the 
person, expressed in and through the thought 
and the speech, which moves and shapes the 
audience to the orator's will. This is the power 
of the musician ; the difference between the 
true musician and the mere performer being 
that the latter has only technique, while the 
former has also what we call soul ; music is but 
the method which that soul takes to utter itself. 



SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 231 

This makes great leaders great. The presence 
of the " Little Corporal " is worth a battalion 
of soldiers, because by his mere presence he in- 
fuses his own invincible courage into all his 
army, and re-creates it by his military spirit. 
This is the secret of the mother's influence ; 
this gives value to her training. Instruction in 
methods cannot make, and ignorance of methods 
cannot mar. If the mother has a true spirit of 
motherly devotion, if she has piety and truth and 
courage and self-sacrifice, these will find their 
expression, and the child will be formed less by 
what his mother deliberately designs than by 
what in her inmost being she is. 

The secret of the world's moral evolution is 
such a personality, brooding all mankind ; utter- 
ing itself through all history in " broken lights " 
and transitory gleams; uttering itself through 
Hebrew history by " divers portions and in 
divers manners ; " and finally and perfectly in- 
carnate in the Christ. 

Who, then, was the Christ ? And what is his 
relation to the religious life, — the life of God 
in the soul of men ? 

Theological controversies about the Christ are 
not in Christ's spirit, nor do they tend to pro- 
mote reverence for his person or his life, nor 
help to bring any soul into a greater love or a 
truer following of him. Into these controversies 



232 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

I mean never to enter. Nor have I any psycho- 
logy of his unique personality to offer to myself 
or others, nor any definition of his relations to 
the Infinite and the Eternal. All our know- 
ledge of truth is relative : I say our knowledge of 
truth, not truth itself. What matter is, no man 
can tell. We can understand only its relations 
to ourselves. What spirit is, no man can tell. 
We can understand it only as it appears in and 
to ourselves. What Jesus Christ is to the infi- 
nite and eternal Father, I make no attempt to 
discuss. I consider only what he is to the indi- 
vidual soul, and what he has been to the human 
race. He is himself the answer to the two great 
questions of our spiritual life : What is man ? 
Who is God ? 

These are the profoundest questions that ever 
addressed themselves to the human soul. What 
am I, and what is my destiny ? — not what am 
I now, still less where did I come from, but 
what are the possibilities within me, and what 
the life that beckons me on to an illimitable 
life ? What will be evolved out of me when the 
work of growth is over ? — that is the real ques- 
tion. If the Christian church had spent half 
the time in studying the problem how it could 
get on, which it has spent in debating the ques- 
tion whether it came from Adam or not, it would 
have made much further progress than it has. 



SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 233 

Evolution is the development of any object 
towards the fulfillment of the end of its being ; 
'and by a force resident in the object itself. 
What I may become depends in the last analy- 
sis upon what is the power within me — the 
power which by my free acceptance I take, and 
so cause to be within me. If I were not a free 
moral agent, it would not be important for me 
to ask this question; but I am a free moral 
agent. The seed does not ask, Shall I become 
a rose or a pear ? because the seed will become 
whatever the soil and the sunshine and its origi- 
nal nature make it. But just because I am a 
free moral agent I must work with God, and 
what I become, whether rose or thistle, depends 
— I say it reverently — as truly on myself as 
on him. I am not a flute, out of which he can 
draw what music he likes; I am not plastic 
clay on the revolving table, which he fashions 
into what he likes ; I am not a movable type 
which he puts where he likes. There is in me a 
power, and that power must cooperate with him, 
or there will be no music in my life, no divine 
figure wrought, no divine truth printed. Now, 
if I am to cooperate with God, if he and I are 
in partnership, if I must toil with him as the 
teacher toils with his pupil or the mother with 
the child, I must know who and what I am to 
be. I must be able to ask him, What sort of a 



234 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

utensil are you purposing to make ? We must 
work together, and therefore we must under- 
stand each another. 

To this great question of questions, What is 
man ? — not in his present condition, but in his 
future possibility — Jesus Christ furnishes the 
answer. He does not furnish the answer in detail. 
Not even Christ is to be blindly and servilely imi- 
tated. You cannot ask him what are the pecu- 
liar duties of a wife to a husband, or of a hus- 
band to a wife, for he never was married ; how 
you are to treat children, for he never had chil- 
dren; how you are to vote in the coming elec- 
tion — he never cast a vote ; how you shall treat 
your customers and clerks — he was no mer- 
chant. It almost seems as if the details of life 
were left out of his experiences in order that we 
might not follow in detail any life, not even 
his. We follow Christ as every ship that 
crosses the ocean from Spain to America fol- 
lows Columbus, marking none the less a spe- 
cial pathway for itself, — each going in its own 
course, yet each following to a common goal. 
He came to give life, and he gave it abundantly, 
and for fullness of life there must be individual- 
ity. He makes us live, not by directing us to 
hew ourselves to a precise and particular pattern, 
but by showing every man how he may be his 
own best self. None the less, but rather far 



SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 235 

more, for this reason, he answered the question, 
What is man ? for he is the type of manhood. 

He was a Jew, and yet he was the reverse of 
a Jew — unworldly, catholic, free. He was born 
in the Orient, but he was not characteristically 
Oriental, — no dreamer or visionary, he. His 
religion was one of practical, every-day life. 
He transcends even the limitations of sex. Man 
he was, yet with all the patience, gentleness, 
and tenderness we attribute to woman ; but who 
will think of calling him that poorest and weak- 
est of creatures, a womanly man? He tran- 
scends all ages, and is the ideal of to-day as he 
was the ideal in the first century. He fought 
no battles, yet Havelock reads the story of his 
life and is quickened in courage. He nursed no 
sick, yet the nurses in a thousand hospitals find 
the inspiration of their patient toil in the story 
of his patient life. He was no merchant, and 
yet he was the exemplar of our Amos Lawrence 
and our Cooper. He was no statesman, yet 
Gladstone is his follower. All men find alike 
in this one unique and incomparable figure the 
one worthy of their following, the type of their 
manhood. He was not a man, but the man, 
filling full the ideal of a complete manhood. 
Do we not idealize him ? No, we have not ideal- 
ized Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is engaged in 
idealizing us, and the work is not completed. 



236 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

As he answers the one great question of our 
lives, What is man ? so, he answers the other 
great question of our lives, Who is God ? The 
great factor in human reformation is divine per- 
sonality. But, if we are to be moulded by a 
person, we must know who that person is. Do 
we want to know about God, or do we want 
personally to be acquainted with God ? These 
are two different questions. In the one, curi- 
osity asks for the measurement of him ; in the 
other, reverence and love ask for personal fel- 
lowship with him. Only curiosity can be satis- 
fied by an ambassador, a prophet, a teacher. 
Out of that Roman conception of theology which 
made God an eternal Caesar and men his sub- 
jects grew by a natural process the conception of 
Jesus Christ as an ambassador from God to 
man. But if God is not a king whose laws we 
are to understand, but a Father whose heart I 
need to know, then no revelation of teacher, be 
he human, angelic, or superangelic, will suffice. 
It is the Person himself I need to know. I can- 
not love by proxy. No account, philosophical 
and skillful though it may be, of the attributes 
of God suffices as a foundation for love toward 
God. Tell me he is perfect in wisdom, power, 
love, mercy ; these are but attributes : it is him- 
self I want to know. The cry of the human 
being from the earliest age — the cry of Job, 



SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 237 

" Oh that I knew where I might find him ! " — 
is still the cry of humanity. All history is the 
search after God. All science, whether the sci- 
entist knows it or not, is the thinking of the 
thoughts of God after him, the trying to find 
him. All art is the search after the ideal art as 
it exists in some true, divine artist. All love — 
of lover, wife, husband, child, patriot — is but 
the fragmentary and imperfect expression of the 
Infinite and Eternal All-loving. All men have 
at the hearts of them more or less of this hun- 
ger and desire to know the Infinite and the 
Eternal. To this hunger Christ is the answer, 
to this " cry of the human " he is the response 
of the divine. 

Let us consider, for one moment, that God is 
training children to be free like himself, and by 
their own free choice to become partakers of his 
nature ; that he can do this only by impressing 
his own personality upon them ; and that he can 
impress that personality upon them only by 
manifesting himself to them. Are there not 
just three ways in which he can do this, and 
only three ? — to the intellect, to the sensibili- 
ties, and to the will? Must he not either by 
his works show himself to the thought of man, 
or by his personal presentation in life show him- 
self to the affections of man, or by his personal 
contact with man, bringing him into obedience 



238 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

to himself, show himself to the will of man? 
How can Arnold of Rugby be known ? Is there 
any way but these three ? We know his school, 
and so we know something of the work he has 
done. We read the story of his life, and we 
see the personality of the man. We sit at 
his table and talk with him ; our life becomes 
intertwined with his ; we enter into sorrow or 
joy and work together with him. Deism gives 
us intellectual knowledge of God — we know 
him through his works. Theism gives us know- 
ledge of him through his will entering our life 
and our attempt to follow out his will as it 
is interpreted in our own conscience. The faith 
of the ages in the Christian church gives us 
these ; but it gives us also the other element, a 
Person manifesting God on the earth — God 
interpreted in terms of human biography, in 
order that we may see and know and love him. 
Corresponding with these three ways of knowing 
God are the three great historical religions, each 
of which serves as a representative of the three 
religions which are now clamoring in America 
for our suffrages — ethical culture, mysticism, 
and historical Christianity. Ethical culture, 
which claims to know that there is a right and 
wrong, but can discover no eternal basis for it 
in a Personal and Eternal Lawgiver, has pro- 
duced China. Mysticism, which perceives God 



SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 239 

only as he is immanent in every human soul, 
but discovers no objective and historical mani- 
festation of him, has produced India. And his- 
torical Christianity, with its triune manifestation 
of God, in nature, in human consciousness, and 
in the one sacred and unique Life, has produced 
Europe. By their fruits ye shall know them. 

It has been sometimes said in orthodox litera- 
ture that Jesus Christ was God ; but that state- 
ment in the New Testament is always accom- 
panied by limitations — the Word of God made 
flesh, God tabernacling among us, The image of 
God's person, The brightness of God's glory. 
Jesus Christ is, in other words, represented as 
God reducing himself to finite proportions and 
walking in finite relations, that we may com- 
prehend him whom otherwise we could not com- 
prehend. The doctrine of the church is explicit 
in its recognition of the truth expressed by Paul 
in his declaration of Christ's " self -beggary " in 
order that he might enter into humanity and fill 
it with the riches of his nature. 

Thus to these two questions of the human 
soul Jesus Christ is the answer. What is man ? 

— He is the ideal of manhood. Who is God ? 

— What Jesus Christ was, in the limit of a few 
years' time and in the little province of Pales- 
tine, that is the Infinite and Eternal Father in 
his dealings with the universe. 



240 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

It is said by one class of critics that the doc- 
trine of the evolution of Christianity necessarily 
involves the belief that Jesus Christ was himself 
a product of evolution ; and as there have been 
over eighteen centuries of spiritual evolution 
since Christ's time, it involves a presumption 
that there are other products of spiritual evolu- 
tion superior to him, or at least that there will 
be such superior products in the future. If 
the evolutionist denies this, if he claims to be- 
lieve in the divinity of Jesus Christ, or, using 
the very inadequate language of theological 
metaphysics, in his supernatural character, then 
it is said that he believes in evolution "with 
an if ; " that he is not a consistent evolutionist, 
but makes an exception. Now if either of these 
statements were true, the result would be fatal 
to the philosophy which underlies this book. If 
the Christian evolutionist regards Jesus Christ 
as a product of spiritual evolution, he gives up 
Christianity, not merely as an ideal of life, but 
as a philosophy. He may still be a devout 
theist ; but he is in no philosophical sense a 
Christian. If on the other hand he declares 
that Jesus Christ is an exception to the law of 
evolution, he gives up evolution ; for God's laws 
are not like the laws of Greek grammar, with 
exceptions. When science seeks to formulate a 
law of life, it succeeds only in case the law pro- 



SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 241 

vides for all the phenomena of life. If some of 
these phenomena are inconsistent with the sup- 
posed law, the supposed law does not exist. A 
single established exception to the law of gravi- 
tation would require a re-statement of the law 
in such terms as would provide for that excep- 
tion. 

Philosophically, Jesus Christ can be regarded 
by the evolutionist in only one of two ways : as 
a product or as the producer of evolution. The 
careful reader will perhaps recall a statement in 
the introductory chapter of this volume to the 
effect that evolution does not account for the 
origin, but only for the processes of life. Even 
the agnostic evolutionist does not — certainly 
most agnostic evolutionists do not — consider 
that life is a product of evolution. Life is a 
cause; phenomena are the product; evolution 
is the method. The theistic evolutionist does 
not believe that God is a product of evolution. 
God is the cause ; phenomena are the product ; 
evolution is the method. So, the Christian evo- 
lutionist does not believe that Jesus Christ is the 
product of evolution. Jesus Christ is the cause ; 
phenomena are the product; evolution is the 
method. This is what the Christian evolution- 
ist means by the divinity of Jesus Christ ; life, 
God, Christ, are not synonymous terms, but each 
of them expresses the finite apprehension of 



242 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

different phases of the Infinite. Life is the In- 
finite in nature as the scientist sees him, evolv- 
ing out material phenomena according to the 
law of growth or evolution; God is the Infi- 
nite as the devout soul sees him, evolving out 
both material and spiritual phenomena accord- 
ing to the laws of growth or evolution ; and 
Christ is the Infinite entering into human life, 
and taking on the finite, in order that he may- 
achieve the end of all evolution, material and 
spiritual, in bringing men to know and be at 
one with God. Does the scientific evolutionist 
believe in evolution " with an if," because he 
believes that life — the Infinite and Eternal 
Energy — is the cause, not the product, of evo- 
lution? Does the theist believe in evolution 
" with an if " because he believes that God is 
the cause, not the product, of evolution ? As 
little does the Christian evolutionist believe in 
evolution " with an if," because he believes that 
Jesus Christ is the cause, not the product, of 
redemption. Must a man choose whether he 
will believe in light, or in the sun ? As little 
need he choose whether he will believe in a 
divine spirit which pervades all life, or in a 
divine spirit from whom comes light and life 
into the world. The huntsman with his burning- 
glass concentrates the diffused rays of the sun 
upon his fagots and kindles them into a blaze. 



SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 243 

In Jesus Christ, the diffused spirit of God, the 
Infinite and Eternal Energy from whom all 
things proceed, the Power not ourselves that 
makes for righteousness, is concentrated in a 
single human life, and kindles humanity into a 
blaze of love, imparting to it his own glory. 

If my reader will remember the perfectly 
simple fact that philosophy must in its study 
always recognize three factors, a cause, a pro- 
cess, and a product, that evolution has to do 
only with the process, and that the Christian 
evolutionist regards Jesus Christ as the cause, 
evolution as the process, and Christianity as the 
product, however much he may disagree with 
my interpretation of Christianity, he will at 
least be saved from a radical misapprehension 
of it. 

To sum up, then, these two chapters in a par- 
agraph : God is in his world of matter and his 
world of men. He is the Word, — " The Word 
was with God and the Word was God." That 
is, from eternity God has been a self -revealing 
Person. He has been disclosing himself. He 
has not been like the Egyptian Sphinx ; he has 
from eternity expressed himself in matter by 
creation, and in human history by the utter- 
ances of his prophets and apostles, and in Jesus 
Christ in propria persona has entered human 
life, in order that he might show us who he is, 



244 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

that so we might have One round whom we 
might put our arms, before whom we might 
bow in reverence, to whom we might give our 
highest, supremest, tenderest love. 



CHAPTER IX. 

CONCLUSION : THE CONSUMMATION OF SPIRITUAL 
EVOLUTION. 

In this chapter I propose rapidly to survey 
the ground already traversed, re-state the con- 
clusions reached, and finally re-define, in the 
language of evolutionary theology, some theolo- 
gical terms in common use. 

God is in his world. Nature is not a ma- 
chine which a mechanic has made, wound up, 
and set going, and with which he must from 
time to time interfere, as a watchmaker inter- 
feres to regulate a somewhat imperfect time- 
keeper. Nature is the expression of God's 
thought, the outward utterance of himself. He 
dwells in it and works through it. Amid all 
the mysteries by which we are surrounded, says 
Herbert Spencer, nothing is more certain than 
this, that we are ever in the presence of an Infi- 
nite and Eternal Energy from which all things 
proceed. This Infinite and Eternal Energy 
from which all things proceed is an intelligent 
Energy. It is an Energy that thinks, and cre- 
ation is the expression of the thought of this 



246 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Infinite and Eternal Energy. Much of the old 
teleological argument, as it is called, may per- 
haps be set aside by modern research, and I be- 
lieve that the notion of secondary causes pro- 
ceeding from a great First Cause must be set 
aside. But in the world there is one underlying 
Cause which is the source and fountain of all 
power ; and the fact that we investigate natural 
phenomena, and endeavor to see their relations 
to one another, shows that there are relations 
in those phenomena which the intellect can com- 
prehend, and which therefore are themselves in- 
tellectual. Science is not the mere putting of 
phenomena in pigeon-holes and setting labels 
upon them. Science perceives in nature a real 
thoughtfulness, and follows along the path which 
preexisting thought has marked out for it. Even 
Haeckel, in the very chapter in which he under- 
takes to show that the notion of a divine Cre- 
ator behind the creation should be abandoned, 
repeats on almost every page the language of 
intellectualism, showing the " purpose " of this, 
the " object " of that, and the " design " of the 
other. He cannot speak of the phenomena of 
the universe, even in the attempt to dethrone 
God from it, without in his very words show- 
ing that there is a Designer, a Thinker, and a 
Purposer. 

This God, whose existence is demonstrated by 



CONCLUSION. 247 

the unity in the material universe, is no less 
demonstrated by the unity of the immaterial 
universe. There is as truly a science of history 
and sociology as there is a science of astronomy 
and of biology ; and as nature, so humanity has 
a unity and a continuity. Mankind are not 
mere segregated atoms of sand on the beach — 
there is a moral unity in the human race. All 
history recognizes this, and evolution brings it 
out more clearly than it was brought out before. 
History as a mere record of the separate acts 
of individuals has passed away, and now the 
true historian, following the example of those 
who in the last century first began to write 
modern history, sees that there is a moral devel- 
opment ; that events lead on to other events in 
the realm of spirit as in the realm of matter; 
that there is a God in history, as there is a God 
in nature — a God who is working out some 
great design among men, as there is a God who 
is working out great designs through all mate- 
rial and mechanical phenomena. 

But God can express himself in terms of 
moral life — can utter himself in terms of right- 
eousness — only through beings that have the 
power of righteousness, and therefore through 
beings that are free to be unrighteous. A man 
forced to be virtuous is not virtuous at all, for 
freedom to choose the evil is essential to consti- 



248 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY, 

tute the good. Thus while in nature God may 
work out the mechanical evidences of his skill 
and love of beauty, he can work out the expres- 
sions of his truth, purity, and holiness only in 
a world which has in it a possibility of the re- 
verse. 

In such a world as this he is expressing 
himself, and has expressed himself from the 
beginning. All men are his children, and all 
nations are his. But as some men show greater 
susceptibility to his presence than others, so 
in some nations he is more manifested than in 
others; and as he expresses himself more truly 
in some lives than in others, so in some nations 
and races he expresses himself more truly than 
in other nations and races. If you ask why one 
man seems to be more susceptible to divine in- 
fluence than another, I answer that I do not 
know. I take life as I find it, and recognize 
the fact without offering any explanation. As 
I do not know why the acorn produces an oak, 
or why the apple-seed produces an apple-tree, 
so I do not know why God in one life seems 
to bring forth results which in another life he 
does not bring forth. But such is the fact ; 
and our business in a scientific study of human 
life is to accept the fact. 

Among all the nations of antiquity, the one 
nation which displayed a peculiar genius for 



CONCLUSION. 249 

what men call religion — that is, a peculiar 
genius for the spiritual and invisible — was the 
Hebrew race. As compared with modern races, 
the Hebrews often seem dull and obtuse ; but 
as compared with the nations about them, they 
were a nation fitted for the beginning of a mani- 
festation of righteousness. For fifteen centuries 
of history, God was dealing with this nation as 
with all nations ; but in this nation the fruit of 
his dealing was manifest as in none other, and 
in men of special spiritual genius of this nation 
as in no other men. During these fifteen cen- 
turies of his dealing with this people, he called 
forth their genius, and out of the writings of 
their prophets he secured, by what you may call 
natural selection or divine providence, according 
as you are scientifically or religiously inclined, 
a permanent book, the Bible. Thus the Bible 
is the expression of God in human thought — 
God speaking to men and through men — God 
speaking through the selected writings of the 
selected prophets of a selected people. When 
the ripeness of time had come, this process of 
speaking to men issued in the Incarnation — 
the speaking of God in man. Up to the first 
century, the Word had been a word spoken to 
humanity. In the birth of Jesus Christ, the 
Word itself became incarnate : God, who had 
expressed himself through men, now expressed 



250 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

himself in a human life. He entered into hu- 
manity, and in Christ Jesus became a sharer of 
human nature. The Word tabernacled among 
men became subject to human conditions, shared 
the weaknesses, the wants, the ignorance of 
humanity. 

For what purpose ? Simply to manifest him- 
self to men ? Such a manifestation, if it led 
to nothing, would give no cheer, — would bring 
no good tidings. If God came into the world 
simply to tell us what God is and what is his 
ideal for humanity, the gospel would be the sad- 
dest message that could be conceived as deliv- 
ered to the human race. As an athlete coming 
to a hospital merely to exhibit to hopeless in- 
valids the glory of a vigorous manhood would 
add to their despair, so a perfectly righteous 
One coming into a world simply to show sin- 
ners how glorious is righteousness would enhance 
their gloom. Christ comes, not merely to show 
divinity to us, but to evolve the latent divinity 
which he has implanted in us. God has entered 
into the one man Christ Jesus, in order that 
through him he may enter into all men. Christ 
is a door, through which the divine enters into 
humanity, through which man enters into the 
divine. " Whom he did foreknow he also did 
predestinate to be conformed to the image of 
his Son, that he might be the first-born among 
many brethren." 



CONCLUSION. 251 

Christ is not a man like other men, but man- 
kind is to become like Christ. The tulip is 
not like the bulb, but the bulb is to become like 
the tulip. This is Christ's own declaration of 
the object of his mission. "I have come," he 
says, " that you might have life." How much ? 
Life more abundantly. What kind of life ? 
Eternal life. The life of God in the soul of 
man. The life that was in Christ. Life such 
that, when humanity is filled with it, his prayer 
will be fulfilled, " that they all may be one as 
thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they 
also may be one in us." 

Christ, then, who is the secret of spiritual evo- 
lution, is also the type and pattern of that which 
will be wrought in universal humanity when 
spiritual evolution is consummated. The incar- 
nation is not an isolated episode, — it is the be- 
ginning of a perpetual work. God is still Em- 
manuel, " God with us." God has not passed 
through human life, entering at one door and 
going out at the other ; he has come into human 
life, and is gradually filling it with himself. 
Thus the Christ is a perpetual presence, an ever- 
living Christ. He is really in his church ; his 
church is really his body; he is incarnating 
himself in humanity ; and thus incarnate is still 
growing in wisdom and in favor with God and 
man. God is still a Word, still a speaking 



252 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

God, still manifesting himself. He is entering 
into human consciousness, and the divine and 
human are inextricably intermingled in one 
divine-human consciousness. The end of evo- 
lution is a glorified humanity, a humanity in 
which God dwells. His tabernacle shall be 
with men. They shall be his children, and he 
shall be their God. This truth is written all 
through the New Testament ; it shines on almost 
every page. Listen to Christ himself. 

You shall be my disciples, my followers ; 
shall take up my cross ; shall do the works that 
I have done and even greater works than I have 
done. I send you into the world as the Father 
has sent me into the world : to teach as I have 
taught, to manifest God as I have manifested 
him; to suffer vicariously for others' sins, as I 
have suffered. The secret of my life shall be 
yours. Ye shall abide in me, and I will abide 
in you. You shall be as a branch engrafted on 
me, drawing as from my veins the life that ani- 
mates me. You shall share my glory, the 
glory that I had with the Father before the 
world was ; shall be with me where I am ; shall 
be one with the Father as I am one with the 
Father. Paul takes up the same theme and 
writes it out with endless variation. Yet it is 
always the same theme. Eighteousness in man 
is the righteousness of God, God's own right- 



CONCLUSION. 253 

coming out of God's heart into human 
hearts. We are partakers of the divine nature ; 
heirs of God — inheritors of his nature ; joint 
heirs with the Lord Jesus Christ ; — having in 
us the same spirit that was in him ; holy as he 
was holy ; pure as he was pure. He is dead : we 
are to die with him. He has risen : we are to 
rise with him. Already we sit in the heavenly 
places with him; reflecting his glory, we are 
changed from glory to glory into the same im- 
age. There is scarce any title of dignity given 
to Jesus Christ in the New Testament which is 
not in a modified form given by the sacred writ- 
ers to his followers. He is the Light of the 
world, — we are lights in the world. He is the 
only begotten Son of God, — we are sons of 
God. He is the great High Priest, King of 
kings and Lord of lords, — we are kings and 
priests unto God. He is the eternal sacrifice, 
— we are bidden to present our bodies living 
sacrifices. God tabernacled in him, and tab- 
ernacles in us. In him dwelt the fullness of 
the Godhead bodily, and we are bidden to pray 
that, being rooted and grounded in love, we 
also may be filled with all the fullness of God. 
In brief, the Bible, starting with the declaration 
that God made man in his own image, going on 
to interpret God in the terms of human expe- 
rience by the mouth of poet and prophet, and 



254 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

finally revealing in the person of Jesus Christ 
an incarnate God dwelling in a perfect man, 
emphasizes the fundamental truth that in their 
essential natures God and man are the same, 
and points forward to the time when man, re- 
deemed from the earthy and the animal debris 
which still clings to him, shall be presented 
faultless, because filled with the divine indwell- 
ing. Now are we sons of God, but sons at 
school and in process of education ; then, when 
we see him, not adumbrated and incognito as 
we see him now, but in all the regal splendor of 
his character, and with all the justice and the 
purity and the love which constitute his divine 
glory, we shall be like him, and God will be in 
us, as in Christ, the All in all. 

History is but the record of the process of 
this evolution of the divinity out of humanity. 
It is a continuous progressive change, from lower 
to higher, and from simpler to more complex. 
It is according to certain definite laws of the 
moral and spiritual life : and it is by means of 
resident forces, or rather a resident force, — 
the force of God in the individual soul ; the force 
of Christ, — God manifest in the flesh, — in 
human society. Thus the church, Christian so- 
ciety, the individual, are all a strange intermix- 
ture of paganism and Christianity, in which 
Christianity is steadily, but surely, gaining the 



CONCLUSION. 255 

victory over paganism. The church is partly 
Roman imperialism and partly Christian bro- 
therhood ; but brotherhood is steadily displacing 
imperialism. Society is partly pagan selfish- 
ness and partly Christian love ; but Christian 
love is steadily displacing pagan selfishness. 
Theology is partly Christian truth and partly 
pagan superstition ; but truth is steadily dis- 
placing superstition. The individual man is 
partly the animal from which he has come, and 
partly the God who is coming into him ; but 
God is steadily displacing the animal. So, 
whether we look at the individual, the church, 
or society, we see the process of that spiritual 
evolution by which, through Jesus Christ, men 
are coming first to know God, and then to dwell 
with him. Under the inspirational power of 
the divine spirit their spiritual nature is grow- 
ing stronger and their animal and earthly na- 
ture more subjugated ; and when the end has 
come, they will be heirs with God and joint heirs 
with the Lord Jesus Christ. 

In bringing this book to a close, I cannot 
better sum up the conclusions to which I have 
endeavored to conduct the reader, than by re- 
defining some common theological phrases in 
terms of evolutionary belief. 

Christianity is an evolution, a growing reve- 



256 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

lation of God though prophets in the Old Tes- 
tament, incarnate in Jesus Christ in the New 
Testament ; a revelation which is itself the se- 
cret and the power of a growing spiritual life 
in man, beginning in the early dawn of human 
history, when man first came to moral conscious- 
ness, and to be consummated no one can tell 
when or how. 

Inspiration is the breathing of God upon the 
soul of man ; it is as universal as the race, but 
reaches its highest manifestation in the selected 
prophets of the Hebrew people. 

Revelation is unveiling, but the veil is on the 
face of man, and not on the face of God ; and the 
revelation is therefore a progressive revelation, 
man growing in the knowledge of God as the 
veil of his ignorance and degradation is taken 
away. 

Incarnation is the indwelling of God in a 
unique man, in order that all men may come to 
be at one with God. 

Atonement is the bringing of man and God 
together ; uniting them, not as the river is united 
with the sea, losing its personality therein, but 
as the child is united with the father or the wife 
with the husband, the personality and individ- 
uality of man strengthened and increased by 
the union. 



CONCLUSION. 257 

Sacrifice is not penalty borne by one person 
in order that another person may be relieved 
from the wrath of a third person ; sacrifice is 
the sorrow which love feels for the loved one, 
and the shame which love endures with him be- 
cause of his sin. 

Repentance is the sorrow and the shame which 
the sinner feels for his own wrong-doing ; when 
man is thus ashamed for himself, and his hea- 
venly Father enters into that shame, as he has 
done from the foundation of the world, — a 
truth of God revealed by the Passion of the 
Word of God, — then, in this beginning of the 
commingling of the sorrow of the two is the 
beginning of atonement, the end of which is 
not until the penitent thinks as God thinks, 
feels as God feels, wills as God wills. 

Redemption is not the restoration of man to 
a state of innocence from which he has fallen ; 
it is the progress of spiritual evolution, by 
which, out of such clay as we are made of, God 
is creating a humanity that will be glorious at 
the last, in and with the glory manifested in 
Jesus Christ. 

Finally: religion is not a creed, long or 
short, nor a ceremonial, complex or simple, nor 
a life more or less perfectly conformed to an 
external law ; it is the life of God in the soul 



258 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of man, re-creating the individual ; through the 
individual constituting a church ; and by the 
church transforming human society into a king- 
dom of God. 



amencan ISeUgtous ieatierg. 

A Series of Biographies of Men who have had great 

influence on Religious Thought and 

Life in the United States. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. By Professor A. V. G. 

Allen, author of " The Continuity of Christian Thought." 

DR. MUHLENBERG. By Rev. William Wilberforce 
Newton. 

WILBUR FISK. By Professor George Prentice, of 
Wesleyan University. 

FRANCIS WAYLAND. By Professor J. O. Mur- 
ray, of Princeton. 

CHARLES G. FINNEY. By Professor G. Frederick 
Wright. 

MARK HOPKINS. By President Franklin Carter, 
of Williams College. 

HENRY BOYNTON SMITH. By Professor L. F. 
Stearns. 

In Preparation. 

THEODORE PARKER. By John Fiske, author of 
" The Idea of God," " Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," etc. 

This series includes biographies of eminent men 
who represent the theology and methods of the va- 
rious religious denominations of America. The Se- 
ries when completed will not only depict in a clear 
and memorable way several great figures in American 
religious history, but will indicate the leading charac- 
teristics of that history, the progress and process of 
religious philosophy in America, the various types of 
theology which have shaped or been shaped by the 
various churches, and the relation of these to the life 
and thought of the Nation. 

Other volumes to be announced hereafter. Each volume, i6mo, 
gilt top, $I.2j. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 

4 Park St., Boston; ii East 17TH St., New York, 



American Commonwealths* 

Edited by Horace E. Scudder. 
VIRGINIA. A History of the People. ByJohnEsten 

Cooke, author of " Life of Stonewall Jackson/' etc. 

OREGON. The Struggle for Possession. By William 

Barrows, D. D. 

MARYLAND. The History of a Palatinate. By Wil- 
liam Hand Browne, Associate of Johns Hopkins University. 

KENTUCKY. A Pioneer Commonwealth. By Na- 
thaniel S. Shaler, S. D., Professor of Palaeontology, Harvard Uni- 
versity. 

MICHIGAN. A History of Governments. By Thomas 

Mclntyre Cooley, LL. D., formerly Chief Justice of Michigan. 

KANSAS. The Prelude to the War for the Union. 

By Leverett W. Spring, formerly Professor in English Literature in 
the University of Kansas. 

CALIFORNIA. From the Conquest in 1846 to the 

Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco. A Study of American 
Character. By Josiah Royce, Assistant Professor of Philosophy in 
Harvard University, formerly Professor in the University of California. 

NEW YORK. The Planting and the Growth of the 

Empire State. By the Hon : Ellis H. Roberts, Editor of the Utica 
Herald. In two volumes. 

CONNECTICUT. A Study of a Commonwealth De- 

mocracy. By Professor Alexander Johnston, author of " American 
Politics." 

MISSOURI. A Bone of Contention. By Lucien Carr, 

M. A., Assistant Curator of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology. 

INDIANA. A Redemption from Slavery. By J. P. 

Dunn, Jr., author of " Massacres of the Mountains." 

OHIO. First Fruits of the Ordinance of 1787. By 

Hon. Rufus King. 

VERMONT. By Rowland E. Robinson. 

In Preparation. 
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ILLINOIS. By E. G. Mason. 
SOUTH CAROLINA. By Edward McCrady, Jr. 
With Maps. Each volume, i6tno, gilt top, $1.25. 

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